Sound Practices in the Global South: Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues 3030997316, 9783030997311

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Sound Practices in the Global South Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Sound Practices in the Global South

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Sound Practices in the Global South Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay Critical Media Lab, Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) Academy of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland Basel, Switzerland

ISBN 978-3-030-99731-1    ISBN 978-3-030-99732-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book is one of the primary outcomes of a self-reflexive and auto-­ ethnographic research through what is known as ‘sound art’ placed in between the fields of contemporary art, media arts and experimental music in the West (Europe, America and their allies). As a sound practitioner originating from South Asia but working in Europe, I aim to locate my own position within a Eurocentric field, which is yet to resonate with a community outside of provincial Europe. Who I am and what I am doing in terms of contributing to this field are at the core of my inquiry and evolving process of self-determination in a globally galvanizing decolonial moment. This personal question strongly aspires to be shared with fellow artists and practitioners having similar backgrounds and migratory histories to build a plurilogue in which a sense of solidarity, care and concern meet with curiosity and interest for critical engagement with each other to unpack personal histories, artistic trajectories and sonic methodologies from diverse regions of the so-called Global South. The artists share similar colonial histories and decolonial struggles for freedom. The research is grounded in extensive fieldwork, which I had begun during my postdoctoral position at the Center for Arts and Humanities, American University of Beirut, where I had been working on the project as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow between 2018 and 2019. First and foremost, I would like to thank the Center for Arts and Humanities, American University of Beirut for hosting and supporting me during the initial research of the project. Later, after the position ended in 2019, I continued the fieldwork which included interviewing artists from the Middle East, v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

North Africa and South Asia in my sporadic travels as an independent researcher. Since 2020, travel restrictions did not allow me to meet artists in corporeal presence to stage these in-depth conversations in person. I had to develop new strategies including making extended use of online platforms such as Zoom in order to have these conversations with the practitioners across the globe. I would like to thank the many artists, composers, musicians, instrument builders, performers and players and other sound practitioners who were born and/or grew up in South Asia, Middle East, Africa or Latin America, for agreeing to talk to me and having the patience to respond to my inquisitive questions. Their generous time and effort are at the motivational center of this book. My sincerest thanks to the artists who took part in the conversation with valued insights, including Clarence Barlow, Sandeep Bhagwati, Rajesh K.  Mehta, Khyam Allami, Cedrik Fermont, Sharif Sehnaoui, Ximena Alarcón Díaz, Hardi Kurda, Mario de Vega, Luka Mukhavele, Khaled Kaddal, David Velez, Juan Duarte, Youmna Saba, Abdellah M.  Hassak, Mariana Marcassa, Amanda Gutiérrez, Syma Tariq, Alma Laprida, Siamak Anvari, Mohamad Safa, Debashis Sinha, Zouheir Atbane, Constanza Bizraelli, Jatin Vidyarthi, Joseph Kamaru, Surabhi Saraf, Hemant Sreekumar, Isuru Kumarasinghe and others. I would like to sincerely thank Prof. Brandon LaBelle for inviting me to co-curate The Listening Biennial (2021);1 his continued support is invaluable for me. The many illuminating discussions with him, and working and engaging with the invited artists are impetuses for this book. Thanks to Prof Marcus Erbe for inviting me to talk in the Sound Studies workshop at Musikwissenschaftliches Institut, Universität zu Köln, where I presented this project in 2019 at its earlier stage along with excerpts from some interview recordings.2 Thanks to Prof. Timothy D. Taylor for allowing me to talk at the Department of Ethnomusicology, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), during my visit to California in 2019.3 I would also like to thank Jacob Eriksen for inviting me to give a lecture at Sound Studies and Sonic Arts, Universität der Künste Berlin, where I presented the project.4 Thanks to Raffaele Pezzella of the label Unexplained  More information can be found on the biennial website: https://listeningbiennial.net/.  See: https://transition.uni-koeln.de/index.php?id=32363. 3  Further information available on the UCLA website: https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/ event/connecting-resonances-global-interactions-in-the-field-of-sound/. 4  See: https://www.udk-berlin.de/en/courses/sound-studies-and-sonic-arts-masterof-­a rts/news/sound-in-artistic-research-online-public-lecture-series/19-jan-20221 2

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Sounds Group for inviting me to curate the CD compilation and Bandcamp release Anthology of Exploratory Music from India, in which I worked again with some of the artists from India that I have been conversing with in this book.5 I thank Palgrave Macmillan for being considerate with me in these difficult years. Thanks to Sara El Samman and Sreya Chatterjee for helping with the transcription of the interviews from the audio and video recordings. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Prerna Sridhar for an editorial intervention and proofreading the manuscript with care, friendship and warmth. Lastly, I would like to thank my mother, Shipra Chatterjee, and my sister for being there and for their presence, and to my friends and associates Mary McGregor, Thomas Glaesser, Heiko Aufdermauer (SilentFilm Berlin), Matteo Marangoni (iii Den Haag), Carsten Stabenow (Tuned City), Ashish Avikunthak, Sudipta Dawn (Culture Monks), Tirthasankha Majumdar and Sougata Roy Chowdhury, for their continuing support.

budhaditya-chattopadhyay-­­sound-in-artistic-research/. 5  Listen: https://unexplainedsoundsgroup.bandcamp.com/album/anthology-of-exploratorymusic-from-india.

Contents

1 Introductory Soliloquy  1 2 Clarence Barlow 19 3 Sandeep Bhagwati 33 4 Rajesh K. Mehta 61 5 Sharif Sehnaoui 69 6 Ximena Alarcón Díaz 81 7 Hardi Kurda 99 8 Mario de Vega121 9 Luka Mukhavele139 10 Khyam Allami157 11 Cedrik Fermont187

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12 Khaled Kaddal225 13 David Vélez243 14 Juan Duarte265 15 Youmna Saba281 16 Mariana Marcassa293 17 Amanda Gutiérrez307 18 Abdellah M. Hassak327 19 Syma Tariq335 20 Siamak Anvari345 21 Debashis Sinha365 22 Mohamad Safa381 23 Alma Laprida395 24 Constanza Bizraelli403 25 Zouheir Atbane423 26 Jatin Vidyarthi437 27 Surabhi Saraf453 28 Joseph Kamaru459

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29 Hemant Sreekumar465 30 Isuru Kumarasinghe487 Bibliography507 Index511

CHAPTER 1

Introductory Soliloquy

After Copenhagen1, Berlin2, Den Haag3 and Kolkata4, artist Budhaditya Chattopadhyay once again meets Researcher Budhaditya Chattopadhyay on a roofless balcony in Beirut adjacent to the working office-room of the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows at the Center for Arts and Humanities, American University of Beirut campus. The bright blue and scorching sunny skyline merge with the deep turquoise of the Mediterranean Sea. Cutting across the skyline, a long cargo ship passes carrying endless cartons of whatnot goods. Its pace as seen from the balcony resembles the passing of the clouds. The horseshoe-like coastline is crowded with visiting footsteps that can be imagined from this empty balcony while the water splashing on water is faintly audible. Artist Chattopadhyay engages in a dialogue with Researcher Chattopadhyay about his current work—a collection of scholarly interviews with artists and sound practitioners from the Global South. They converse within the lively noises of Beirut and respond to the city with distinct grains of the voice. In between their conversation, the sun goes down and a surveillance helicopter hovers over the urban landscape to decipher the meaning of the day. The thoughtful pauses in their conversation hold the smell of gunpowder. 1  Chattopadhyay, B. (2017). “Autolistening”. In Francis, Richard (ed.), Exercises in Listening issue 3. Auckland, New Zealand: End of the Alphabet Records. 2  Chattopadhyay, B. (2021). “Howl Redux: On Noisific(a)tion”. In Mandic, M (ed.), Law and the Senses: Hear. London: University of Westminster Press (in press). 3  Chattopadhyay, B. (2021). Unrecording Nature, in Kuljuntausta, Petri (ed.), Sound, Art, and Climate Change. Helsinki: Frequency Association. 4  Chattopadhyay, B. (2021). ” Co-listening”, in The Listening Reader. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_1

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BC (Artist):

Can you give me a background of your current postdoctoral project at the Center for Arts and Humanities, American University of Beirut located in this lovely campus? BC (Researcher): The seed of the questions I am trying to address here were incepted during the last ten years of living and working in Europe as an immigrant artist, sound practitioner and researcher. However, I officially started the project in 2018 when I began a one-year Mellon Postdoctoral position at the Center for Arts and Humanities, American University of Beirut. But its development wasn’t limited to one year. Since 2019, I have pursued it on my own because my position and the one-year contract ended in 2019. There are three different phases of investigation in this project. The first phase is a sonic ethnography through a series of interviews and in-depth conversation with artists, exploratory musicians and sound practitioners. Rather than interviewing, this part stages a series of dialogues and conservations with artists from the key areas of the Global South, including Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Latin America—specifically what is termed as ‘non-West’ in Europe. These diverse regions share a commonality of a fraught colonial history and freedom struggle. These regions were deeply affected by European colonisation, and migratory movements occurred from these regions to Europe. I try to develop ontologies and epistemologies of sound practices of artists who were born or grew up in these regions, and who largely have a migratory history enriching the Global South diaspora in Europe. I am not trying to ‘map’ sound practices in these regions, as ‘mapping’ entails a colonial objective approach: when you map and make straight documentation, you adhere to a Western cartographic method of area studies. My aim is listening together with the sound practitioners uncovering the discursive elements such as finding out different trajectories of practices and different layers of listening that developed historically.

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Through this first stage—the stage of investigation in the form of the conversations with the artists themselves—we discover untapped knowledge systems. The second phase is listening and reading these texts and conversations for figuring out the premises or entry points of the idea of decolonial sound practice in the Global South with a broader perspective of intercultural confluence. The third phase is writing these illuminating thoughts and ideas down and sharing it with peers across the globe. The first stage goes on between 2018 and 2021. Contemporary Global South artists continue to be critical and engaged with issues linked to their regions’ turbulent and fraught history of colonisation, decolonial struggles and social division under the colonial policies of divide and rule. These conflict-ridden experiences make their work interesting and thought-­ provoking. However, in Europe or in the larger Western world where most of the funded curatorial activities take place, an unfair social divide is upheld in contemporary curation of sound and listening driven arts as well as in the writing of its history. This divide is practised often due to a lack of critical engagement with the artists from South Asia, Middle-East and Africa (broadly known as the Global South), and through ignoring, under-representation, under-­ referencing, pigeonholing or appropriation of the ‘non-Western’ scholarly perspectives in a globally canonising body of work in the field. My artistic vision is to bridge this gap in my capacity as an artist—creating an equitable environment of reciprocity, confluence and solidarity. What do you think as a researcher? How do you like to contribute to a re-writing of sound history that is equitable? From a scholarly position, I would like to create a fertile entry point into the field of sound practice and listening modes in the Global South to understand the unique sonic sensibility and media aesthetics of these regions. Such new knowledge may fundamen-

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tally shift the perspectives in the field of sound studies and within a global media art history with a decolonial approach to re-examine notions of temporality, spatiality and subjectivity. The research may help comprehend a fundamental issue in the studies of modernity and globalisation that is concerned with media cultural encounter and technological transmissions between Global North and South as a two-way process of postcolonial confluence and not a one-way affair. By bringing the Global South’s sound practitioners and thinkers to the foreground, their works, thoughts and artistic methodologies may reach out to the wider global audience for a much-needed critical engagement and assessment. This book may benefit the large pool of sound practitioners active in the Global South, particularly the media producers, audiovisual practitioners, musicians and artists whose arts and crafts have often been neglected and ignored in the Eurocentric field of sound curation, sound and media art history. Do you think your project will make a relevant contribution to the emerging sound scholarship and research that is known in the academic West as ‘sound studies’? In the arts and humanities, ‘sound studies’ has emerged and rapidly established itself as a vibrant and productive academic field resulting in the current profusion of scholarly writings in the broader areas of film and media studies, music history and musicology, performing arts, studies of science, technology and society, and cultural studies focusing on sound and listening. Three consecutive compendia such as The Routledge Sound Studies Reader (2012), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2013) and The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (2018) have been complemented with Journal of Sonic Studies (Research Catalogue) and a number of other peer-reviewed journals that are entirely dedicated to the studies of sound. These publications show that now sound stud-

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ies indeed is a relevant area of research receiving wider academic attention. Notwithstanding this rapidly growing body of work (Sterne, 2003, 2012; Born, 2013; Théberge et al., 2015; Dyson, 2009; Demers, 2010; Novak & Sakakeeny, 2015; Pinch & Bijsterveld, 2013; Bull, 2018), much of the attention has been invested in studying sound within an American and/ or European media cultural context. Sounds in other contexts like in Asia and Africa (broadly known as the Global South) have largely remained underexplored although some of the regions in the Global South (e.g. India, Egypt and Nigeria) have a formidable global presence as emerging giants in the media arts and cultural production, while India is the world’s largest producer of film and audiovisual media. This book intends to address this lack of scholarly attention by developing a comprehensive understanding of the sonic realities and the struggles and methodologies of artists from the key areas of the Global South through a self-reflexive and auto-ethnographic investigation in which various trajectories of sound practices and artistic processes are drawn on through in-depth conversations with prominent artists and sound practitioners. This collection of conversations constitutes the main body of the book complemented with a number of critical and scholarly commentaries on auditory culture, media and decoloniality as well as the performance and entertainment industries. These commentaries aim to explore the historical developments of sound practices in the light of current theories of decoloniality with a phenomenological approach of critical co-listening. The book contributes to a better understanding of sound production practices for and beyond entertainment, as complex cultural as well as aesthetic systems with a bottom-up approach of producing knowledge about the production practices directly from the practitioners who contribute to developing alternative methodologies to counter various colonial pressures and historical dam-

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ages. The research project leading to this book as one outcome refocuses on the working methods of the practitioners themselves to unearth the field and locate a tension between the production of an audience-centred culture in the sound media and entertainment industry (where pleasing mass audience through typical immersive tropes for entertainment such as sound art exhibitions and corporate festival are a prerequisite), and individual desires of practitioners to express themselves in terms of their arts and the critical faculties questioning existing structures of power in European contexts. This new corpus of knowledge is a key scientific contribution to the field of sonic research. These questions fruitfully complicate and reconfigure the state of the art in the contemporary studies of sound. The book breaks new ground by bringing the Global South’s sound thinking to Eurocentric sound media studies and by developing a new decolonial theory of sound studies by examining the transcultural confluence in sound media against the colonial model of othering of cultures and hegemony over listening approaches. The findings of the book will enrich decolonial discourses in sound and listening (Steingo & Sykes, 2019; Salois, 2019) and contribute to larger debates around decolonisation of scholarship and aural diversity. How is sound practice different in the Global South (given that the term of ‘Global South’ is quite a recent formation and it is largely construed while responding to the post-colonial formulations such as Third World with its inherent power structures)? Is it okay to put the diversity of voices under one umbrella? How do the diverse auditory cultures of the geologic counterpart of West/Global North respond to the current milieu of decolonisation? These questions are rarely asked in contemporary studies of sound. Auditory cultural productions from outside the Western canon are often typecast without receiving thorough critical assessment. Often, the aca-

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demic attention they receive is through Western exoticising lenses and a listening ear of canonised scholarship tinted with colonial modernity. However, there have been fundamental incompatibilities between the transcendental, temporally non-linear, non-perspectival and improvisational nature of performing arts and music in India, the Middle East and Africa and in many other indigenous cultures, and the temporal, spatial and technological constraints of the modernist ‘recording’ practice (Kinnear, 1994) introduced in Asia, the Middle East and Africa by the erstwhile colonial powers like the British Empire in the early part of the century. No wonder then that the practitioners of Indian classical music at the turn of this century were deeply sceptical about the recording of their renditions on the media (cylinders and shellac discs) primarily because of such aesthetic incongruences. However, Indian films and music production gradually embraced the recording practices and assimilated the Western/modernist influence in the production aesthetics. I am trying to uncover how these confluences were developed and how to trace these critical intersections between artistic tradition and Western modernity and their profound ramifications in the history of sound production in the Global South by learning from the practitioners themselves. Did these critical interventions manifest in the way sound was produced? How do these reflect in contemporary practice? The book considers the spatiotemporal disruption caused by colonial technologies that primarily aimed to measure, quantify and rule colonial subjects—the advent of sound recording in the Global South is a significant point of departure to study not only the emergence of the colonial sound industry plundering local resources and the erasure of local sounds and their resonances under modernist pressures but also cultural exchanges and artistic mélange between the East and West or North and South. With a focus on the sound production practices

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in some of the key area of the Global South, this book examines in the practitioners’ own words while they ruminate on their ways of listening and working with sound; this often takes place in a self-reflective and auto-ethnographic mode. ‘Sound production’ is considered one of the key cultural areas where transcultural movements have been pronounced and remained dynamic throughout modernity (Gilroy, 2004; Eshun, 1998). ‘Global South’ is indeed a problematic term, but a better term than the derogatory ‘Third World’ in which imbalances in power between colonisers (Europe) and colonised (South Asia, Africa, Latin America, parts of Middle East) are celebrated rather than questioned. I use the term ‘Global South’ throughout this book being fully aware of the problematics of planetary binaries reducing the scope of these regions. I am still looking for a better term. What are the specific contributions of this book project? The project contributes to the current sound studies scholarship by paying heed to the position and experience of Global South sound practitioners and researchers, enabling a close reading of modernity from the perspective of the East/Global South and by critically listening to the ‘confluences’ or ‘disjunctions’ that shape modernity. The project re-examines a fundamental issue in the studies of a colonial model of modernity that is concerned with the cultural and technological transmission from the West to the East, and from the Global North to the South, but which fails to consider the reverse. Challenging this status quo, the project advocates for an equitable knowledge exchange in the field of sound that reflects contemporary sound production. The primary argument is that current works can be seen as an East–West confluence that started at the end of the nineteenth century through cultural and artistic exchanges and technological transmissions. This confluence is examined as a mutually enriching interaction, which was undermined by colonial power structures. It will be traced by analysing a wide range of

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relevant works that involve media technology like sound recording that tend to negotiate traditionally oral South Asian sonic worlds by conforming to the culturally imperialist pressure of the West to follow certain technological frameworks and medial dispositives. This critical approach will help in understanding the intensified confluence of methodologies owing to (sonic) globalisation, producing new knowledge in the studies of media modernity, and exchanges between Global North and South with a decolonial approach. One of the main outcomes of the project is for this book to be a comprehensive attempt to systematically delve into the subject of sound practice and auditory culture in the Global South by focusing on the voices of the practitioners not as case studies, but as equal participants in the knowledge creation. Drawing insights from prominent artists and sound practitioners as real-world knowledge in ways of listening and sound practice in the Global South, the book as a collection of in-depth conversation builds a grounded ­knowledge base. These conversations are generated over a number of years through personal interactions and spontaneous dialogues in person and over Zoom. Citing many examples from representative sound works from the key areas of the Global South, this book provides an entry into its complex sound worlds to facilitate informed reading for enthusiasts of audio media, sound and exploratory music, film and new media. This book facilitates an auto-ethnographic intervention into a rapidly emergent field of sound both in artistic practice and academic scholarship, as a qualitative method approached from the unique perspectives of sound practitioners themselves as the direct stakeholders. By tracing this trajectory of sound production in the Global South as a pertinent field of knowledge, the book makes a comprehensive and essential reading as a reference volume on sound practices, methodologies and thinking beyond the obviously Eurocentric field of sound studies.

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Why is the subtitle of the book Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues? Cultural studies scholar Ella Shohat describes a multifaceted ‘plurilogue’ as a ‘dissonant polyphony’ that ‘links different yet co-implicated constituencies and arenas of struggle’ (Shohat, 2001, p. 2). The emphasis on reading differences within Global South sound practices resists the homogenising tendency of Europe’s extended-/extra-colonial and superficial engagement with the ‘non-West’ that glosses over the Global South as a unified area of practices and thoughts. The idea of a plurilogue thus pursues dissimilarities to clarify the conceptual interventions made within various trajectories of sound practices and sound theories and the relationship among the different patterns of colonial oppression that each intervention in this multi-pronged dialogue exposes. Plurilogued engagements bring these conceptual strategies and understandings of multiple narratives together not to resolve or prioritise them, but to more effectively appreciate the complexities of, and varied coalitional strategies for resisting the imperial and racialised erasures and oppressions of European colonialism and its extension into global capitalism. The name Plurilogue derives from the term ‘omnilogue’, coined by John Rawls and Christine Korsgaard. The term indicates a pluralist dialogue in which all participants may partake in the conversation, thus concurrently developing a converging, perhaps noisy, but profoundly alive discussion involving many voices that engage with each other with a sense of camaraderie. Plurilogue thus emphasizes the diversity and the many pluralisms of voices, utterances, methodologies, concepts, sites, interests, languages, traditions and cultures that inform and enrich such multi-logue. The reason for changing the sub-title of the book to ‘Co-­ listening to Resounding Plurilogues’ is to underline that these scholarly conversations with sound practitioners and researchers are plurivocal and multifari-

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ous, so as to challenge the idea of the Global South as a binary formation of the Global North, and therefore to advocate for a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, methodologies and approaches that are constantly engaging with each other while the book facilitates this reverberant conversation as new knowledge formation and sharing. The idea of the ‘plurilogue’ is a strong point of entry to this unpacking of a multi-­ voiced heterogeneity that challenges a monolithic idea of a Global South. This plurivocality is a resounding response to the reductive approach of Europe towards its ‘other’. What are the questions that you asked the artists to respond to? How did you curate these questions? Broadly, the book convivially engages with the sound practitioners and thinkers who have a strong connection with regions that are today known as Global South in terms of their birth, growing up years, cultural background and working base, or migratory departure point. As a researcher working with sound, my trajectory is similar. In this book project, my aim is to colisten with the practitioners rather than taking an objective interviewing position with an ethnographic approach. As I discuss in the book chapter ‘Hyperlistening and Co-listening: Reflections on Sound, Selfhood, and Solidarity’ (Chattopadhyay, 2022),5 colistening is an evolving process of connecting aurally with the co-habitants of a context in which the individual listener is also situated. The focus of co-listening is on this sense of emergence, indeterminacy and flux while listening together. This togetherness involves the surrounding environment and the bodies that inhabit this environment. Co-listening entails a compassionate engagement with the other listeners in a shared situation or context. From this perspective, the questions

5  Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (2022). “Hyper-listening and Co-listening: Sound, Selfhood, Solidarity”, in Woodland, Sarah and Vachon, Wolfgang (eds.). Sonic Engagement: The ethics and aesthetics of community engaged audio practice. London: Routledge (in press).

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that I asked the practitioners I engaged with are not so important as they merely serve the purpose of sparking of a conversational narrative. The emergence of knowledge is generative and bottom-up, as the extractive mode of ethnography is not encouraged in these conversations. Rather, the friendly engagement makes the practitioner speak freely and I as the listener, the researcher and a potential reader learn from their own mouth how they negotiate the overarching taxonomies and methodological pressures of the Eurocentric field of ‘sound art’ and survive in an inequitable field of sound practice. Scholars of qualitative research in the social sciences such as Jody Miller and Barry Glassner note that semi-structured and open-ended interviews solicit ‘authentic accounts of subjective experience’ (Miller & Glassner, 2011, p. 131). The focus on a conversational mode of engagement rather than straightforward interviews helped the sound practitioners ‘to speak in their own voices about their art and craft’ (LoBrutto, 1994, p.  1). Sound studies scholar Mark Grimshaw asserts that a qualitative approach involving semi-structured interviews ‘allows the interviewer a certain level of control which directs the interviewee down particular paths. Equally it allows the interviewee to expand on themes outside the limits of the questions, which can reveal unexpected information’ (Grimshaw, 2011, p.  54). The tension between selfreflective analyses and a bottom-­up approach of co-listening forms the backbone of the book ensuring that the knowledge ‘remains grounded in real-world practices’ (Kerins, 2011, p. 10). Do you see yourself and your fellow artists from the Global South as part of specific traditions or historic lineages when it comes to your way of working with sound? Recently, Peruvian scholar Marisol de la Cadena suggested in a talk that ‘there is no singular world, or many discreet worlds. There are only connections and relations’. Resonating with this perspective, I see

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myself not as part of a particular tradition or historic lineage, but as a confluence of various alive traditions and sonic trajectories and lineages not determined by skin colour or national or cultural backgrounds, but remaining emergent and unfolding through mobility, exchange and global interactions. The notion of a reductive colonial understanding of ‘tradition’ is questioned throughout these conversations to invite redefinitions of cultural grounding and social formations as constantly transformative. In which ways are music and sound art different and/ or inter-connected? Do you like to question the much-used terminology and categorisation of ‘sound art’ developed in the Western canon? Music has a loaded history related to how humans appropriated natural sounds into a compositional structure consisting of (mostly) humanly affordable sounds, for example, drones and rhythms related to the body’s capacity and limits to sonic perception. Even though sound-based artistic practices focussed on disembedding sounds from their environmental sources as compositional objects, such as ‘field recording’ as we know it today, emerged as a much practised form in the West, very few people yet appreciate field recording as a musical practice outside of the provincial Europe, and the people who do usually have trained ears conditioned with a particular Western-­dominated culture of listening in which natural sounds can be objectified as human-mediated compositions. Music is a direct example of how nature folds into culture for human consumption and Anthropogenic aesthetic experience. Sound art, meaning using disembedded sounds in a compositional or exhibitory context for audience consumption rather than being ingrained in a communal and natural practice, is foreign to many cultures. In my essay ‘Beyond Matter: Object-disoriented Sound Art’, I have discussed why exhibiting sound artwork is problematic and how the idea of the visual object of

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sound needs to be challenged.6 Sound art, such as field recording—the practice of recording sounds from the environment in a linear musical formulation, pretends to go back to pre-cultural mediation states as it takes the natural sounds as a ‘purer’ content and mode of (re-)presentation. Sound art and field recordings may unpack the phenomena of environmental decay on the earth, but most often it ceases to mobilise environmental or climate action as the aesthetic consumption of the sound compositions most often overpowers its socio-­ political potential. However, there are exceptions: for example, Cities and Memories released a series of works based on field recordings of political street demonstrations. After the blast in Beirut, a compilation of sound works was dedicated to the victims of the ­tragedy. There are many instances of musical forms like protest songs having socially galvanising impacts. But sound art has relatively little impact. Given the concept of Nada Brahma, many spiritual traditions from the Global South have regarded sound as the existential basis of being in the world. Regardless of whether you are taking a scientific, spiritual or socio-political position in this book, what is your own take on the idea of a global harmony and sound as the foundational element of connecting and co-existing? Sound travels from one body to another, and on its path it makes connections. An utterance connects a voice to its listener, and thus knowledge is shared in a society. To me, this social capacity of sound is significant. Before I think of sound as a universal foundational element, I think of sound in terms of a personal cognitive world-building in which collective memories coalesce with the immediately lived experiences of situated listening for navigating the everyday and enhancing the capacity to survive and endure. When it comes to non-European notions like Nada Brahma,

6  Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (2017). Beyond Matter: Object-disoriented Sound Art. Seismograf/DMT (special issue).

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in the West it is understood as a spiritual unification of sound from an Orientalist ear, but one must acknowledge the profound injustices and inequalities that are concealed under this exotic ontological perspective of spiritual unification. From sound-based curatorial practices to sonic research, non-White artists and scholars have often been denied dignified entry to these fields. The dominant discourses are often Eurocentric, and such Eurocentrism is often celebrated rather than questioned. I, as an artist of colour, didn’t have much affordance of an easy access to modern technologies as well as to knowledge and its canonisation. That privileged space is often saved for white male artists and scholars. I must say that it is still an unequal struggle for me to continue work in the field of sound, in terms of job selection and funding, in finding commissions and invitations. One must acknowledge that there is a question of ­affordability— lack of support and funding curtails many of the aspirations in worlds outside Europe, and after entering Europe such voices face a new kind of structural inequality. Therefore, before we romanticise terms like Nada Brahma that are exotic for European ears, we need to understand the context in which such terms developed and engage with that contextual framework from an interest in critical engagement and assessment. In this book, I aim to foreground this problem of exoticising and stereotyping of terms and concepts arising in the Global South, to make the readers aware that contemporary renditions of these contexts and knowledge systems are necessary to unpack in an equitable field of sound beyond the othering of voices and perspectives usually found in sound studies.7 What is the structure of this book?

7  A more consise response to a cognate question can be found on my contribution to the 15 questions database of interviews with musicians and sound practitioners across the globe: https://15questions.net/interview/budhaditya-chattopadhyay-talks-sound/page-1/

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The introductory soliloquy will introduce the historical and theoretical premises of the book from an auto-­ ethnographic intervention into the field of sound practice and theory. This self-reflexive approach helps to engage the reader with the main concerns of the book. The questions and answers in this introductory conversation or self-talk draw out the conceptual and methodological framework of the book. The second and main part of the book consists of a collection of conversations with prominent sound practitioners from South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. The conversations, as a bottom-up approach of studying the practices and aesthetics of sound, often challenge Eurocentric knowledge systems. These free-flowing conversations with Clarence Barlow, Sandeep Bhagwati, Rajesh K. Mehta, Khyam Allami, Cedrik Fermont, Sharif Sehnaoui, Ximena Alarcón Díaz, Hardi Kurda, Mario de Vega, Luka Mukhavele, Khaled Kaddal, David Velez, Juan Duarte, Youmna Saba, Abdellah M. Hassak, Mariana Marcassa, Amanda Gutiérrez, Syma Tariq, Alma Laprida, Siamak Anvari, Mohamad Safa, Debashis Sinha, Zouheir Atbane, Constanza Bizraelli, Jatin Vidyarthi, Joseph Kamaru, Surabhi Saraf, Hemant Sreekumar and Isuru Kumarasinghe help learn about the nitty-­ gritty of sound practice and the socio-political predilections.

Bibliography Born, G. (2013). Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Cambridge University Press. Bull, M. (2018). The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies. Routledge. Chattopadhyay, B. (2022). Hyper-listening and Co-listening: Sound, Selfhood, Solidarity. In S. Woodland & W. Vachon (Eds.), Sonic Engagement: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Community Engaged Audio Practice. Routledge (in press). Demers, J. (2010). Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford University Press. Dyson, F. (2009). Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. University of California Press.

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Eshun, K. (1998). More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books. Gilroy, P. (2004). After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon: Routledge. Grimshaw, M. (Ed.) (2011). Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments. Hershey: Information Science Reference. Kerins, M. (2011). Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kinnear, M.  S. (1994). The Gramophone Company’s First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908. Popular Prakashan. LoBrutto, V. (1994). Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound. Westport: Praeger. Miller, J., & Glassner, B. (2011). The “Inside” and the “Outside”: Finding Realities in Interviews. In D. Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative Research: Issues of Theory, Method and practice (pp. 125–139). London: Sage. Novak, D., & Sakakeeny, M. (Eds.). (2015). Keywords in Sound. Duke University Press. Pinch, T., & Bijsterveld, K. (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Oxford University Press. Salois, K.  R. (2019). Listening Towards Decolonization. Sound Studies  – An Interdisciplinary Journal, 4(2). Shohat, E. (2001). Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in Transnational Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Steingo, G., & Sykes, J. (Eds.). (2019). Remapping Sound Studies. Duke University Press. Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke University Press. Sterne, J. (Ed.). (2012). The Sound Studies Reader. Routledge. Théberge, P., Devine, K., & Everrett, T. (Eds.). (2015). Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound. Bloomsbury Academic.

CHAPTER 2

Clarence Barlow

I met Clarence Barlow personally in a number of occasions and visited him in Barcelona in 2019—during this visit, he kindly came to attend my performance at La Place, Barcelona. This conversation took place in 2021 over Zoom while I was in Kolkata, India, stuck in a COVID-19 lockdown. BC: I want to ask you firstly about your coming to work with sound and music—particularly experimental music, electro-acoustic compositions—from the very beginning of your journey. CB: Music started in my life when I was about three because my mother, who used to play the piano (but not very well), thought it was a good thing for me to be able to do. So she began to give me piano lessons on a toy piano and then later when I went to school at the age of four, I began soon after to have piano lessons there officially. I didn’t like the idea because I didn’t like the idea of practising and all of that but as the years went on, I turned out to be a pretty good pianist and won a lot of medals, prizes and stuff. I began to compose music because I was playing in the school orchestra and listening to and playing all that music, I thought, ‘well let me try writing some of it myself or at least composing’. So at the age of 11, I began to compose; at the age of 13, I began to write down the

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay–BC; Clarence Barlow–CB. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_2

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music in score form because I was also studying music theory intensively. Regarding contemporary music, I didn’t know anything then because what I did know was the music, first of all, of Mozart and then I began to learn about Beethoven. I found it difficult to understand but then I began to love him very much and then I began to understand Bach. And actually, my taste began to expand in both directions starting with Mozart—so getting into the late nineteenth century, getting into even the fourteenth century and I knew all of that music before I knew of contemporary composers. I even caught up with Schoenberg and Bartók at the age of 19. And, finally, I was writing my own contemporary music around that time; first in the style of Bartók, then I went on and wrote twelve-­ tone music, and then I went on to write serial music at the age of about 22, 23. I think I out-scripted my own composition teacher Stockhausen1 somewhere around that time because he remained at the conservatory and I went on my own way doing my own stuff. In 1969, when I was 23, I also took my first electronic music lessons. I wrote an electronic study and later I wrote one piece that was 11 minutes long and one that was longer—it was 25 minutes long, I decided to use a computer because it was at the age of 24 that I conceived a composition for instruments which I realised would need a lot of calculation because it had to do with probability. I then went and studied computer programming at Cologne University. When I wanted to do this other piece—the second piece which is 25 minutes long—I had to go to Stockholm2 because there was no studio anywhere in Germany which had electro-acoustic music as its mainstay or even as a part of it. I went and programmed the computer there and came back with a piece of eight tracks and this was in 1972 when I was 26. I haven’t turned back, I keep programming and I keep making electro-acoustic pieces, and instrumental pieces too with the computer, piano pieces. BC: Wonderful. You moved from Calcutta to Europe at the age of 20? 21? CB: 22. Another story is very quickly told: because of Beethoven and Mozart, I became a member of the Goethe Institute Library, Max

 Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007).  Elektronmusikstudion (EMS). Stockholm.

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Mueller Bhavan,3 and they noticed I was borrowing records of classical music; they said that these records were never borrowed, they were always standing there collecting dust and Munich—the headquarters of the Goethe Institute—was always sending them packets of these LPs. So they asked me if I would do little talks on Saturdays—for free obviously because they didn’t want to pay me any money. But I did that, they were very pleased with me and I got to meet the new Goethe Institute director whose name was Georg Lechner. He took a great fancy to me, became a friend, and one day, he said, ‘You should go and study in Germany’. So he got me all the papers, I filled them out and I was selected. So I went to southern Germany to learn German first of all—that was in June ‘68. I became a German citizen much later. When I was in Calcutta, I spoke very bad Hindi and almost no Bengali whatsoever. I could read the script—I still can—quite fluently but I did not know how to speak the languages because in any case in Calcutta nobody, except Hindi speaking people, spoke any correct Hindi. We were just taught this wrong form where everything was I come, you come, but all with ‘aataa’, ‘jaata’, ‘jaata’, ‘jaata’. BC: When you were growing up in India, at that time, you had canonical influences like Mozart, Beethoven, who were historical figures in the Western music canon. But did any other figures in India or South Asia inspire you while growing up working with music? CB: When I was 12, I was fascinated by astronomy and mathematics and so I knew about Kepler Euler, but only very distantly. I built my own telescope at the age of 12 and saw the craters of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter through my own telescope. So those were my other interests and I did want to become a mathematics professor and an astronomer one day. But finally what happened to me was that my exam results at the BSc in Calcutta University weren’t so bright and I tried to get admitted to Jadavpur University and they refused me because my grades were not that high. So that’s how my science studies came to an end and I became a conductor, a concert pianist and a composer instead. BC: That’s an interesting story. Your composer’s career chose you rather than you choosing it.

3

 See: https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/sta/kol.html

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CB: Well, Jadavpur University forced my hand. Very interestingly, about five or six years ago, I gave a lecture there as a professor from California. They were very honoured and they told me it was great to have me there, and then I told them the story about how I was refused there as a student; I said it with a smile obviously. BC: Did you also study Indian classical music at that time? CB: Well that is another story, which can be told quickly. There was the Calcutta School of Music4 where I was teaching music theory and I was probably about 19 or 20 at that time. They sent us a string of three professors to Calcutta to teach there, and there were also nominal principals of the school. One of them was named John Cooper, I am not sure whether he is still alive because if he were or he is I, tried to reach him but I was not successful; he is probably 97 or 98 now.5 He became a professor there and he asked me, ‘Tell me all about Indian music’, and I said, ‘All I know is that they have instruments called Sitar, Sarod and Tabla, but I didn’t know anything more than that’. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even like Indian music because I used to hear it on the streets from radio stations, from loudspeakers perched above the doors of hair-cutting salons and places like that and I said, ‘What a strange kind of music’. But then he took me to a concert of Ravi Shankar and because, of course, I could hear pitches very well, I could hear all notes of the raag he was playing, I knew it was in the Bilawal thaat. Now I know that at least I knew it a year or two later because it wasn’t in the major key and it was very interesting and I liked it a lot. And then he did one more thing—he started the Indian music department of the Calcutta School of Music which had been a totally Western music school. He appointed and found some rich donors, well-known people to teach Indian music there. So the vocal was Dipali Nag, the sitar was Imrat Khan, the tabla was Karamatullah Khan, and all these people became staff members of the Calcutta School of Music. And I, as a staff member, was allowed to have free lessons, while everybody else had to pay. So I started to learn the sitar with Imrat Khan and one day he told me that he’d been invited to the 50-year independence celebrations in Kabul, Afghanistan.  See: https://www.calmusic.org/ and http://calsmus.blogspot.com/  John Cooper is a pianist and composer; his biography is available on this website https:// www.macdowell.org/artists/john-cooper 4 5

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He wanted to take me along as his tanpura player. Actually, he needed me as an English translator because he spoke to me in bad English and I understood his English and would be able to speak to the Afghans in an English they would understand. So he managed to get a lot of gigs in people’s houses to play privately. And so I was there for two weeks and listened to a lot of Indian music. I had a book of Western staff notation—an empty book—and I began to write all the bandishes that I was hearing. I began to write them down in Western notation. Imrat Khan was totally impressed and he said, ‘You must teach me this notation’. Of course, we never got around to it. But he was very impressed that I was able to write down these things and sing them as well. Then later in 1974, I went to Calcutta for about one and a half years. I took private lessons with Sunil Basu.6 He was a singer who used to teach at the Sangeet Research Academy (SRA).7 I don’t know whether he is alive, I think he is not. He lived in Ballygunge and used to always go there for voice lessons. I never became an Indian musician; I could not ever sing a raag or play a raag for you (although I have played a few raags on the piano). A little story again—Sunil Basu was invited to my home which was on the rooftop of a house in Elliot Road. My parents owned the building and he was sitting outside talking to people because it was a nice terrace we had. One of the guests said, ‘Clarence, come play your Raag Desh on the piano again’. I said, ‘Oh but Sunil Basu is here now and if he hears it, he will be shocked!’ He said, ‘No I am sure he won’t be, go ahead and do that’. And then I went to the piano and started to improvise in raag desh. Suddenly I started to hear behind me ‘Baah, baah, keya baat’ and stuff like that. So, obviously, he appreciated what I was doing and he asked me to join a crusade against the harmonium in favour of the piano. BC: Do you have some comments to make about the difference between so-called Western sound and ‘Indian sound’ if any. CB: There are similarities and differences. I believe they must come from the same roots because it is the same 12 notes. And when 6  Late Pandit Sunil Bose was one of the veterans of the Agra gharana, associated with the ITC Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata where he was a Guru. 7  See the website: https://www.itcsra.org/

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people in the West say that there are 22 shrutis, meaning the octaves variate in 22 equal parts, they’re talking through their hat, because if you listen carefully to Indian music, you find very rarely a microtone. There are microtones that belong to some Gharanas and raags: Hamir might have a very high dha. Marwa might have a high komal re. But basically they have the same 12 notes. The difference is that whereas Western music can be played on a piano, Indian music kind of can also be played on a Santur but doesn’t have any possibility of meend or gamak. Indian music has a lot more of these ornamentations with glissandi and gamak—little turns made quickly. Indian music has a lot of those and, of course, you can tell Indian music within two seconds that it is Indian music. I could recognise a raag within five seconds; I knew about 50 raags at one time. So there are differences and, of course, one big difference is that Indian music is monophonic, so we have one musician playing and if you have even two playing in jugalbandi, they will switch back and forth and never play at the same time; rarely will you hear them playing simultaneously at the same time. Sometimes they might play the bandish together but you would never have that in the West. The music is not only monophonic, but it is also polyphonic. But it is nonsense to say that Indian music has no harmony because Indian music definitely has harmony as the Western melody has harmony too. For instance, if you listen to raag Tilak Kamod, you will have what Westerners call the dominant seventh. When you go from re ma pa ni then going to sa, that’s what the Westerners would call a resolution of the dominant seventh to the tonic. So there are harmonic similarities too and Marwa is what I call a bitonal raag because it is basically dha pentatonic, Bhupali on dha, with a drone on sa, so it has two keys at the same time because sometimes you will stop on the sa but then you go down to the dha and carry on the dha pentatonic and Lalit—that’s really three keys because actually the sa is the sa but the ma is the real hidden tonic and then, of course, everything is in gandhar pentatonic otherwise. So you have even harmony in Indian music.

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BC: But there is a difference in performance because—if we think about traditional practices like Dhrupad,8 it is sung for hours and it is sung with an improvisational mode which is not durational. CB: Yes, definitely. The great thing about Indian music is, once I heard an Amjad Ali Khan performance of one raag Nandkosh, which took two and a half hours, just the one performance including Alaap, Gat and Jhala, but it took two and a half hours. And I was fascinated and I thought it couldn’t have been more than 40 minutes. BC: Yes, the sense of temporality. CB: Yes, definitely the durational length. But then we do have Western composers including myself who have written hour-long pieces, Morton Feldman wrote pieces which were two hours long and more and my longest piano piece is almost 4 hours long—it is a solo piano piece but it is almost 4 hours, played in one stretch. So you have that in Western music as well but of course, it is typical for Indian music and I hate it when people play very short performances of only 20 minutes or half an hour. They are already in the Gat and they barely started the Alaap, you want them to explore the raag. A style what I do not like, I must confess, is Thumri.9 I used to compare it to Rossogolla.10 BC: Yeah, Thumri. CB: I did love Rossogolla I must confess. BC: Yeah, Thumri I think adapted to the limitation posed by the newly imported recording technology on performance time. Perhaps that is why Thumri could be accommodated within a disk’s recorded time, but a typical Dhrupad performance could not be. CB: Yes. There are a lot of LPs with Nikhil Banerjee and other people playing and they stuck to the 20-minute limit which is a pity. I used to love going to those all-night concerts in Calcutta where you would start around eight in the evening and stop at about eight in the morning or six. I used to be there all night and listen to all the 8  Dhrupad is one of the oldest forms of musical sound practices in South Asia; Alaap is its introduction, which is a detailed and free-flowing elaboration of the raga.While Dhrupad concerts take a few hours to present, Alaap can take more than an hour to establish the raga’s mood through an intricate building of sound without rhythm accompaniment. 9  Thumri is a vocal form in Hindustani classical music that is based on romantic literature.—While the origins of thumri are unclear, it is characterized by its sensuality/eroticism and a structural flexibility with respect to raga structure. 10  Rossogolla is a popular Bengali sweet, made of sweet cheese.

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BC:

CB:

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raags that followed and at some of them, you might have had six performers during one night with two hours each. Do you think that recording technology and the form of the ‘album’ that is produced following a music production process— where a performance often is registered on a linear durational limit, for example 30 minutes—is an invasion into the Indian music or sound performance? I think that recording can capture the mood, but particularly I am happy that we have DVDs now which can go on for hours so we are not limited to the 20 minutes, 30 minutes, anymore. So you can have a recording of a raag formed wonderfully on a DVD and I have a few myself and I indeed love to listen to them. I don’t listen frequently because I am always busy writing emails and stuff like that and I don’t want to be distracted from the music by the email or vice versa but all the same, I think it is a good medium. And I think radio is a good medium for broadcasting into people’s homes. Yes, it did play a role to popularise many forms of classical music and we grew up with radio, but I was also wondering about the limitation posed by recording on a music performance which is often improvisational and which doesn’t limit itself within a certain duration. Personally, I am a musician, but I would not be able to tell the difference if I had my eyes closed. If I listen to somebody playing in a hall or listen to a DVD on good speakers, I wouldn’t know the difference. I enjoy my Beethoven on CDs very much; I don’t see any limitation there. The limitation could be the fact that the live performance is live and you are actually sitting there and watching the person and listening to the person directly play and catching every step of the improvisation but I believe you can record the improvisation and later would still have some of the improvisational effect. Right. Another question I was nurturing to ask you was about your impression of Europe when you arrived in Europe and became a German citizen. But growing in Calcutta, do you think there was an intercultural confluence in the sense of different cultures melting and creating some kind of hybrid mélange? Well, that happens, there are lots of people who believe in fusion and stuff like that and I definitely go often to Indian restaurants, but in Calcutta, I had little part in any Indian culture neither

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­ engali nor Hindi because I didn’t speak well either language; my B religion was Catholicism, I spoke English only, and very bad Hindi. So when I went to Germany, I knew German culture—not the language, but the culture—because of the music that I loved to listen to. So I felt it was like a homecoming for me and when I got to know the German language, it took me a year or two to speak it somewhat and it took me about five years to master it. When I was in the German language, I felt German and English were my two languages and my two cultures. So I got to love India later through this American professor who came to Calcutta, John Cooper on the one hand who introduced me to Indian music and through another John—more through the other John—John Cage, who had such a view of the environment that I began to understand Calcutta when I went there in the 70s as a great symphony—a symphony of sound, symphony of smell, all kinds of visual symphony. And I loved Calcutta so much that I went back with equipment from Cologne radio and recorded 20 hours of material in the course of three months and made a 48-minute piece out of that, an electro-­acoustic piece, a music theatre piece you might say. Was it a field recording composition? Based on field recordings? Exactly, field recording, yes. Sometimes I went to a cremation but I had my microphones hidden in a box. Also I went to the stock exchange and had my microphones hidden in the box with two openings so they could record and the tape recorder was inside as well. Is it possible to listen to the piece sometimes in a performance? Definitely. It’s been recorded, obviously; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to present it on the radio in Cologne. It is an eight-­ channel piece, but it can be heard in stereo and it has the name CCU, which you are probably familiar with—Calcutta Airport.11 So that piece is 45 minutes long. As a matter of fact, the producer in Cologne radio who gave me the commission to make that piece was a producer of acoustic art and he was sceptical about making a portrait, an acoustic portrait of the city. But then, he thought about it and said, okay go for it. And many years later, well over all the years,

11  CCU (named according to the abbreviation of Calcutta International Airport, now Kolkata, CCU) is based on tape recordings of the city; the piece is an acoustic portrait of the busy Indian city.

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he began to follow my example and commission other people to make portraits of cities. At the very end of his career in 1999, he retired in February 2000, 2001 to be precise, but in 1999, my wife and I went around the world, all around the globe starting in Germany coming back to Germany but stopping for 11 days in Calcutta. Everywhere, every city that I was in, or every country or place that I was in, I made a recording every single day and out of that, I made a 41-minute piece because again I got commissioned by the same man and I gave it to him on the day of his retirement, 28 of February 2001. What was the title of this new piece? This piece is called ‘Zero Crossing’.12 It is called that for three reasons. One reason is that I crossed the equator twice; I crossed the dateline three times because I flew across the dateline westwards then again eastwards and again westwards and I was able to celebrate 1st January 2000, twice—one in New Caledonia and once in Tahiti and I made recordings of everything, and the third reason was the Greenwich meridian. But there was actually a fourth reason you might notice from acoustics, when the sound waves cross the point of rest that’s called a ‘zero crossing’. So that’s the title. Okay, that’s the reason behind the title. And you mentioned John Cage. Did you meet him? Oh yes, and he loved my Calcutta piece, he praised it a lot. He was very nice. But I didn’t see him often; at the end of his life, he was beginning to lose his memory and so he didn’t recognise me once because a few years before that I had been interviewed by Polish television and he was at the interview as a transcriber and asked to make one of his mesostic poems based on that. Which he did, and you can hear his voice saying, ‘This was written for Clarence Barlow using his own words’. That’s the way a piece of mine begins based on his voice and some years later he forgot me and said, ‘Oh you were in that series too’. So he had forgotten that his mind was failing. He inspired you to rediscover India in a certain way, or Calcutta? Yes, one thing is ego loss, that was one thing I had learned from him, even though he was quite an egotist, I learned that I was not important in a conversation of mine but the conversation was more

 Listen: http://clarlow.org/compositions-by-year/zero-crossing/

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important than I am and I would do my best to make it a good one. And the other reason is to listen to the world around me. Cage used to say, ‘Just open the window and listen to the city, that’s already music’. And I took him at his word and that’s why I also went around the world and made recordings, field recordings, to make another radio play. And those field recordings were stereo field recordings with the microphone? They were actually eight channels but broadcast in stereo. But they were played in the concert hall where John Cage heard the first one on eight loudspeakers in a hall and I asked for eight loudspeakers. Another question before we leave. I think this could be the final question. Do you think that identity and cultural background, the way we understand it in classical music, is it something that you consider crucial? No, on the contrary, I don’t feel any sense of identity. I don’t even say usually I am a composer. I say it is more important to know what I do than what I am and so writing music is one of the things I do and I have lost all feeling for identity. Any national identity? None at all. I am against nationalism, totally against nationalism. Even though I have a German passport, I would never go around saying I am a German except officially or maybe in an office. And also perhaps when we think about identity we also think about the way we present ourselves to the world, like engaging with the audience. Do you think that your audience engagement is some sort of strategy or is it something like a concert hall in which there is a barrier between the audience and the performer? Or do you like to create a more community kind of performance in which audiences are participating in the process? Again, not at all. I don’t need an audience. I write music for its own sake and if it gets performed, then well, that’s good; I am not going to stand in the way of the music being performed. Like you might remember—know the name even—Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji13 an English composer of a long time ago whose music was so difficult

13  Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was a British composer and pianist with a Parsi origin—his father was from Bombay/Mumbai, India. More information about his life and work can be found on the Sorabji Archive: http://www.sorabji-archive.co.uk/

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it was played so badly, he stopped having it performed and people asked him in an interview later, ‘Suppose somebody was playing a piece of yours across the street, nearby?’ and he said, ‘I wouldn’t cross the road’. So I am not like that but I don’t go out of my way to make my music public. You will find everything on YouTube which has my music is not put there by me, I don’t do that. I do have a website where I would like to make my stuff available, particularly for when I am gone. But the website is in a horrible state and I need to spend time, I need at least one year working on that because I have such a long, long, list of pieces. Different kinds of pieces, electro-acoustic and multi-channel works, how will you keep them? Well, I wouldn’t be able to upload them, but I would be able to maybe upload eight or four mono channels as separate files. And, of course, I would like to have a publisher; my publisher died about ten years ago and since then I have been managing my own stuff— managing meaning not asking anybody to play to but responding to people who want to play my stuff. So then making the scores readable and sending them out as pdfs; a lot of my pieces are not on pdf because they were written back in the 50s and 60s, but at some point, I will make pdfs of all of them and make mp3s of all the recordings that I have. So I would like to make it available but I don’t go public, I don’t try to reach the public in any way. If I am in a huge hall with a huge audience I would probably know about three people in that audience and I don’t care about how the people I don’t know feel about music. The people that I know, my friends, I do care how they feel and it makes me happy if they like what I am doing. So you compose for your friends and for yourself? I compose for the piece. I am curious to know what it will sound like, so I make it. For instance, just to give you one little example, a piece which has been quite popular recently is called ‘Coronialus’ and it’s based on Beethoven’s ‘Coriolanus Overture’ and I got the idea when the Coronavirus came out. I like to make puns as you probably know, and at once Beethoven’s overture came to mind and I thought of making a piece based on a recording of that overture but just for six seconds and stretching it out and transforming it by the genome of the coronavirus. I did that, programmed it and it has been accepted in a number of places for performance, so that

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is kind of very nice. If there is a call for recordings, then I will answer it sometimes not because I want the public but because I would like these people to know about what they are asking, I will tell them. Okay. It was such a pleasure. I wish that we can meet and talk further. Because of time and because you have to leave, Zoom might not be for the kind of anecdotal insights that are very natural for this conversation to flow. I think a face-to-face conversation is far better than a Zoom call. Much better. Why don’t you come back to Barcelona? Yes, I will definitely come to Barcelona maybe in October and take forward the little conversation we had here. Great, I will be here after the 7th because I’ve been invited to a concert on Karlsruhe in Germany on the 25th. So I will be going there on the 23rd then going to Cologne for about 10 days then returning to Barcelona on the 7th. So I hope to see you after that. Yes, I will definitely come in October to talk further, taking and departing from this particular conversation which is just the beginning, and then the rest we can do face-to-face. Thank you. Thank you for your time and see you soon. Always a pleasure, Budhaditya.

CHAPTER 3

Sandeep Bhagwati

This conversation was held on Zoom over a coffee. Later, I met him in person during The Listening Biennial in Berlin. The discussion we had during this conversation is leading us to co-organise Soundings Across the South symposium and workshops in collaboration with Akademie der Künste Berlin (2022). BC: The idea is to understand the nature of confluence in sound practice in different global sonic traditions which came in contact with each other through the process of globalization and also through de/colonisation, and to inquire what forms of exchanges and transmissions took place, and what kind of forms are emerging through this interaction between the so-called East and West, Global North and Global South, and how the question of coloniality and imperialism and power relationships between these two prominent global orders would implicate new forms to emerge. To start with, let me ask you what the primary differences in sound thinking, practice and ethos are, and how they can complement each other in the form of a confluence? SB: Interesting, very interesting. Your focus is on India right now or South Asia?

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay–BC; Sandeep Bhagwati–SB. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_3

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BC: My focus is on India for the CD release which is coming along, but this larger research project inquires about the sound practices in the diverse contexts of the Global South. The CD is a compilation of experimental music and sound works from Indian composers and artists curated by me. An Italian publisher and label owner invited me to curate this particular CD from Indian composers. But the book and the research project is not only on India; it is focused on the Global South including South Asia, Middle East, and Africa, and a part of Latin America as well. It’s a large canvas. I am talking with select artists, composers, musicians from these regions to find out their approaches, their perspectives on the issues of coloniality and identity from their personal experience. This is a research I started in 2018 with a postdoctoral grant from Mellon at the American University of Beirut. At the moment I am working on my own because after the grant ended, I didn’t find another affiliation—I am looking for another so that I can continue my research: a collection of interviews, which is complementary to the monograph; these two books are parallel to each other. One is the scholarly outcome and the other is the ethnographic outcome. SB: One of my earlier interests when I entered into this field having been trained in Western music but having roots and family and everything in India (in another tradition) was that I observed that you could listen differently and that your listening changes when you listen to one music or when you listen to another. One of my first realisations of what new music should be was that it is something that leads you through different types of listening. What happens when different types of listening clash or connect or inform each other? And composition today should explore precisely these encounters. It’s not about music traditions as such; it’s more about the listening traditions. The same piece of music listened to in two different setups can be something completely different. I was curious about that but I never really pursued it as a field of research so far, I just thought this would be a really good way to describe what people should be doing or can be doing or are about to do anyway. I am really curious what you’ll find. BC: I would like to ask you about what you mean by different listening approaches. How do you see this difference between listening approaches and methodologies through your own experience of growing up since childhood? Is there a space for the word ‘tradition’ (a complicated word, which is, listening traditions)?

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The most obvious thing is the time scale with which you engage. When I used to be in India, I went mostly to classical Hindustani music concerts. You engage more or less the entire night for this, certainly, there were these long college concerts at Elphinstone College in Mumbai where you could go and spend the entire night and many other festivals too. For some reason, I mainly went to festivals. And that was, of course, very different from the Western way that I had grown up with in Germany where you engage for two hours and then already everybody is bored—‘overloaded’ may be the better word. And I felt that listening in the West was like listening to concentrated music—a concentrated package—and in India, it was a much looser (not diluted because such denseness is not the original state of music, it’s a later state), a more experiential form of listening. My conclusion at the time (I must have been in my early 20s or so) was that Western music is like a movie where you edit out all the boring parts, whereas Indian music is embedded into the live stream of listening. One is an artificial timeline and the other one is the timeline in sync with the normal timeline that everybody has anyway. That was one difference in experiencing these two musics regardless of their content. The density could be high in individual performances of Indian music too. It’s just that such moments of high density occurred in between other moments where nothing happened and those too were part of the music: when the musician stopped in the middle of the music to retune or to drink a cup of tea or to do something else that was necessary to do and then continued, for example. Everybody would see that, some people would sleep. I was really entranced by this different temporal experience, that’s my first (quite surface) observation, but it eventually reaches deep into the structure of this music. Because if your attitude and bodily posture are different, so is the way that you treat time, and the venue itself is a much more natural space where you can get up and eat while you are listening—for me this opened up a passage to other ways of experiencing the music. When I went back and composed, one of the first big decisions that I made was that I would not write short pieces even if I was explicitly asked to do that. Most of my pieces are really long, starting with 50 minutes and going up to 4 hours or longer. For me, it is an ­important engagement to enter into a piece like that: you are not in the quick consumption mode; you’re in this immersive mode. It

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doesn’t mean that music itself needs to be spread out. For example, one of the 4 hour pieces is 36 movements of a piano solo and these movements are really dense, really compressed music in many ways. But even so, if you have four hours in front of you and you hear three minutes of very compressed music, you have a different relationship to it. I am very interested in such relationships in immersive time and immersive space that will generate another form of listening or the question of whether you have to sit when you are listening to my music. There are pieces that expressly do not allow you to sit in the sense that, of course, you can sit if you have to, but you won’t experience the same concert if you sit. You will experience it in a particular way when you move around and interact with the performers. These different things came from this listening experience of different times and immersive time. BC: Do you think that the listening experience that you had in India or in any non-Western setup had something to do with its cognisance or inclination towards nature? Nature has a wider definition in the sense that communities are also part of nature. An experience which is not cut off from nature like drinking a glass of water during a performance, for example, becomes natural in the sense that you can withstand it for longer durations, because it is part of natural processes of growth, living, and temporalities. SB: I didn’t think of it in that way at the time. I almost ever went to anything in the countryside; for me, it was a city experience. And so the question of nature didn’t really come to my mind but, of course the connectedness is different at night and at 04:00 AM in the morning. And then having a piece being played when the sun rises, that really stays with you. The theory of Indian music is full of such connections to time of day, time of year, seasonal events, and so on. I don’t have the emotional association that a trained Indian listener has so for me it’s very clear that this is a cultural preformation and as such not nature. It is not an actual way of being, it’s a cultural pre-formation and you need education in the raga system in order to get that connection. When I am thinking about music in a society where you are in constant contact with nature, the music will also be in constant contact with nature. I am currently preparing a project, for example, for Berlin, inviting elders and musicians from Australian indigenous populations who still practise the song, the song line tradition, singing the land into existence and having a

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singing relationship with the land. I want to invite them to teach Berliners how to have a similar relationship to their city, and singing the city into existence in a Berlin way, not in the Australian way—to enter into this kind of knowledge of how to connect one with another. So there is a big interest in understanding how these things correlate, but for me, this will always be on the side of culture. The culture is interested in nature, of course, but is nature interested in culture? I doubt it. BC: Of course, yes. Nature–culture binary is one of the debatable issues today. How nature unfolds into culture and why it’s not vice versa is a field of pertinent inquiry. SB: We have this whole Anthropocene discussion with a questioning of all these binaries. I think the way that human have used binaries over the past few centuries may still be pertinent because there is a sense that certain practices are detrimental to natural processes and others are less detrimental. There might still be some pragmatic use we can make of the nature–culture divide even as we understand that it is not a fundamental divide. But there is a difference in degree, and I think this can be acknowledged. BC: Yes, of course. And in the way you put it, the concept holds; particularly the traditional concert hall in the West and the way music has been presented and communicated through a capitalistic mode of division between the podium and the audience sitting, and the frontality of their interaction without direct engagement with audience. Rather it was meant as audience consuming the sound experience within a time constraint—one hour of stipulated concert timing for example. This is far less degree of interaction with the nature than the Indian way of dedicating a musical performance to a particular time of the day. SB: I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Verona where they perform opera in the Arena, which is a Roman amphitheater; it is open to the sky and the city of Verona is not big, so it’s very near natural phenomenon. People come there and eat and have dinner and an opera is going on and then the next opera comes on. So it’s a very lively atmosphere there and this, most observers agree, is a remnant of the old Italian tradition of how to experience opera. It was not something that you did reverentially like listening to the ­pronouncement on stage, but it was something where you ate and drank. Likewise, there is this tradition that Christopher Small writes

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about in his book Musicking, where he describes the Rotunda in London in which Haydn and other composers had to perform their pieces, and it was an enclosed mall where they played street music.1 The only way that you could get people to stand still in front of the stage was if the music was interesting enough. There was no other incitement, they didn’t pay for entry and the musicians just had to be interesting enough for the listeners to become engaged. The capitalisation of the concert happened only in the mid-late nineteenth century and it never really worked for new experimental music because you couldn’t charge people for that. So it has always been dependent on sponsorship and stage funding and other forms of support that are not commercial. In that sense, cutting off the music from its environment is a vital component of the practice of Western music today and it has to do with the climate, obviously; it’s not so feasible to do outdoors concerts in sub-zero temperatures. But it also has to do with this commodification and what I call the ‘silencification’ of music. This is another point that I noticed when I compared my experiences: of course, the Western concert hall is always a place of silence, and it’s a place of artificially induced silence because the walls of that hall are thick, the seats don’t make noises, and it’s all optimised to create silence even though there are hundreds to thousands of people in the room. The people are educated through a complicated peer education system to be silent as well so that the music can be a packaged product that is perceived by itself—so that the music comes from silence. Because of that practice, there is in Western thinking a whole mythology about how music comes from silence. It would have never occurred to anyone in the eighteenth century to say that music emerges from silence nor would it occur to any Indian thinker because it actually doesn’t in their everyday experience. For them music emerges from some other noise, and it goes back into some other noise. And Indian musicking has sort of ritualised that in the tanpura which in some sense is noise that music can emerge from pregnant noise. BC: Yes, the pregnant reference. SB: Yeah, the pregnant reference-frame, exactly. For me, it was pretty evident that in India music comes from other noise and goes back 1  Small, Christopher (1998). Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.

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into it and so the idea that music comes from silence was problematic to me. In my practice, it often happens that you don’t know where the music really starts and suddenly people notice, ‘Okay there is music’. I am just recording with some musicians in Canada; they are recording lockdown pieces of mine at home, and I told them that they should record with open windows and not to tell their children not to come in so that there is always some kind of interaction with the real world and the music even in the video. It is one of the important factors to think about when thinking about music. Yeah, for example, the sound coming from the other apartment that you can hear—it is very melodious and there are many minor chords, micro-tones as well. Is it a musician neighbour? No, they are drilling. Ah, they are drilling. Okay. Reconstructing some part of their wall but it sounds so musical and melodious. I was thinking if you can elaborate on how you deal with this difference in approaches in listening in your own words, and also in theorising your own practice. There are canons that we follow when we think about sound practice. In general, the canons that we follow are very Eurocentric. Is it possible to decolonise the Western canon and to invite other thought processes, other ways of thinking and listening towards a pan global sound practice? That’s a question that has been occupying me for many years now. One difficulty with the Western new music tradition is that it’s not a tradition in the usual sense. It is a tradition but it is a very syncretic tradition and a non-geographically centred tradition. It has social centres that are spread out through Europe and North America but it doesn’t understand itself as belonging to anywhere. Most of its practitioners actually come from another tradition, and until recently almost no one was brought up in contemporary music or contemporary sound practice. They always come to it after or during their teenage years as a kind of break away from the parental mould. It is a unique form of tradition where you are initiated into it through a rite of passage; no one is ever born into it. It has various characteristics that I find both appealing and at the same time problematic. One of the

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appealing aspects is that it is inclusive in its gesture. And this gesture could be one of invitation, which often becomes one of grabbing—but whether you grab or invite, it is inclusive. And its composers have in fact engaged with every practice they have encountered: you will always find some composer who encountered Balinese, Laotic or Iranian music in the course of their evolution, and who has then in many different ways productively engaged with it. BC: Like Debussy, Claude Debussy? SB: Like Debussy, like others. Yes, that is one of my theories that ‘new music’ is actually the result of global encounters, but I will maybe come back to that later. So from its own point of view, contemporary sound practice is universal and ubiquitous, yet we know that in reality it isn’t and that its canons are still made and propagated and supported mainly in Europe and North America. BC: Because of the power structures. SB: Because of global power structures. In an article, I once compared Germany to Hollywood. If you as an actor are any good regardless of which country you are from, you want to make it in Hollywood because it’s the only real access to a global reputation that we have for an actor or filmmaker. Germany especially and a little bit Holland, Austria and France play these gatekeeping functions in the new music world. If you want to be successful in this world, you must go through one of these gates. So if you have performances and festivals in Berlin, Venice, Paris, Den Haag or somewhere in one of these big festivals, then you have made it and you are recognized. That is an economic situation but it’s also a sign that these festivals themselves are not closed systems where they only promote their own thing, but they are constantly on the lookout. If you really want to bring in another perspective, everybody is eager to receive it—and that’s where the listening comes in. Because even though the curators may be very eager to show this different perspective, the audience will be from that country or in that country, will listen to things in this particular way, and any curator will know that this might be a super interesting piece in the Indian context, for example, but you cannot perform it for a European audience. The Madras String Quartet, for example,

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has a long tradition in India.2 I don’t know if you know them but you couldn’t programme this string quartet at a festival of contemporary music in Europe, even though they play kritis of South Indian composers on string quartets thereby making them different things than they were.3 It is a very daring and groundbreaking practice in the Indian context. Even though this is a true transcultural exchange, it’s not an exchange that would be of any interest to a Western audience because all they can hear is modal melodies played in slightly strange ways—and to them that is not new music. Also, when I think of contemporary art, there is this talk about a kind of global biennale art, as opposed to other local arts. My wife is an art curator so she is involved in that side of things, and she says it is very evident which kind of artist can get noticed in the global biennale art system—mostly those that do installations or video art and things like that. But an artist who paints abstract canvases has no chance because abstract painting is out in the global biennale world even though in the artist’s home country it might be important, groundbreaking and innovative and fostering a big community around them. They will never be received in the global biennale circuit unless they produce art specifically in the ‘biennale’ mode, which some then do—they will make one kind of art for their local scene and another for the travelling curators. And it may be a similar thing with sound art, as it emerges: sound art is a very new thing because computers only recently became cheap enough to make sound art a viable proposition for everybody. We will see artists in cultures that are not geographically located in the West doing sonic art and some of them will have careers in ‘the Hollywood of Western music’, and others will remain local entities whose work will not be recognisable in its importance for this globally dominant establishment.

2  The Madras String Quartet was founded in 1993 in Chennai, India, and is well known for performing western music repertoire regularly. The founders of this quartet had a formidable base in Carnatic music, but aimed to explore new frontiers in chamber music performance with a unique combination of Southern Indian classical music with Western harmonic principles. This integration of the Indian and Western classical music systems has been widely hailed as novel; unlike many other fusion works that exist. 3  Kriti is one among the fundamental compositional forms in Carnatic music.

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BC: It is a very helpful perspective about sound art being local and global in different contexts. How it’s being consumed or made ­palatable for a consumptive audience, particularly in biennale circuits because biennales are funded entities and they demand certain artworks to be presented to their audience. But innovations are not a property of the West; there have been innovations, experimentations, long time before Europe stepped on the land since 1626. Innovations in the form of musical instruments, innovations in the way sound or the voice is practised when we think of Alaap,4 of Tarab5 or different elements of Maqām6 in the Middle East. Innovations are thought of as the property of Europe—only Europe can experiment, so experimental music means a very Europeanised idea of experimenting with sound. SB: You are right, of course. And it would be totally against the nature of humankind to not be innovative. I just wonder about this distinction between innovativeness here and there. One thing that I have noticed is that when my Indian friends are innovative, they often say, ‘I learned it from my teacher; it is something my guru did’. They will never say it is something that they have invented. So that means that there must be a social and cultural stigma attached to innovation in music: if you say that you invented something, it’s considered almost worthless because there is no heritage to it. I think that could be a leftover from colonial times when you needed to justify your existence with reference to a tradition: if you would claim to innovate in a situation where a more powerful culture wants you to change anyway, you would break with your own tradition, and by thus abandoning your own tradition, you would give in to the coloniser’s power. So this kind of locked-in-ness that you can see in the classical Indian scene is really interesting. There is no 4  Alaap is the meditative entry to a Dhrupad performance—one of the oldest forms of musical sound practices in South Asia. It is an detailed and free-flowing elaboration of the raga. Alaap can take more than an hour to establish the raga’s mood through an intricate building of sound without rhythm accompaniment. 5  The term Tarab is used in Arabic sonic culture to describe the emotional effect of music. It is also associated with a traditional form of art-music in which ecstasy and trance have a significant relevance. 6  Maqām is a set of pitches and quintessential melodic elements, or motifs, and a traditional pattern of musical use. Maqām is the principal melodic concept in Middle Eastern musical thought and practices.

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desire to be innovative because innovation means abandoning something precious. So there is a desire to keep that alive which had been kept alive through hundreds of years of oppression by the very fact of being conservative. BC: Yes, absolutely. This conservatism is also embedded in, for example, South Asian and also in African traditions. SB: It is legitimate in many ways; I don’t decry it because I can understand where it comes from. But that attitude will probably lead to a perception on both sides—not only from the Western side but also from the Indian side—that innovation is something that belongs to the West because it is celebrated there. I once made a joke and said if a Western composer invents 0.1% and 99.9% is traditional/something that everybody has done already, they will always say, ‘I made a groundbreaking discovery.’ If an Indian musician changes almost everything like many have done like Kumar Gandharva, for example—if you compare Kumar Gandharva to previous singers he diverged from his forefathers in many aspects—yet he would always have said, ‘I learned this from my guru and I am in this tradition’, and he would not have claimed to be innovative because that would not have been well received.7 For Western audiences, the difference between somebody like Gandharva and Faiyyaz Khan is almost imperceptible—the style is too far away, too unfamiliar. So it is only Indians themselves who could claim their innovative-ness and who could celebrate it. Unless they do, I don’t think Western listeners will celebrate it for them. BC: I think it is not about the colonial hangover alone, but it has something to do with embeddedness: embedded knowledge in a community in a hierarchical form in which the guru is the originator and the knowledge that we derive orally through generations. Thus, it is something whose ownership remains with the guru. So this embeddedness is something crucial here and it doesn’t exist in European thinking because Europeans were from the colonial time onwards disembedding themselves from the land, and from nature, in order to condition themselves to go out of European landscapes and explore, exploit, other lands, other resources. Likewise, Dipesh 7  Pandit Kumar Gandharva was an Indian classical vocalist, well known for his unique vocal style and for his refusal to be bound by the tradition of any musical gharana or school of singing style in India.

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Chakrabarty in his new book discusses how such ‘disembedding’ is a central element of and a departing point for the European colonisation.8 Yeah, absolutely yes, the embeddedness into the tradition. The fact that only something that has been around for a certain amount of time can be valuable because it has been used so often that it becomes valuable through usage. That in itself is, of course, a structural problem with innovation as it’s looked upon by the West. I experienced this with my own group: I have this ensemble in Pune and it came about in a very interesting way. I was asked by a new university called FLAME University that wanted to offer music courses in non-Indian music, which in itself is a very innovative step in Indian music education: you learn the traditional form, but you also learn about other forms. They asked me to teach about Western music—a lecture course, not training people, just providing information. For these Indian musicians, I had to totally reframe the narrative of Western music from their point of view so that it could become intelligible. While I was teaching in this university, I noticed some older people who were around 30/35/40, so definitely not students. It turned out that these older people were musician friends of the professor Sameer Dublay who had invited me, and they had been listening in. Sameer and I had talked about the possibility of doing some practical exercises during my stay. And so it turned out that these people were there for those practical exercises, and what they were most interested in were two subjects of my lectures—Gregorian chant and Fluxus. They asked me ‘can we also do Fluxus music?’, and I said why not. So we started sitting together with some students too, and trying out conceptual ideas in the context of Indian music, and learning to sing a Gregorian chant together. They all participated in different degrees. Some of them only spoke Marathi and Hindi, and I don’t speak any Marathi, and in Hindi, I can say a few words but not really musically intelligent stuff, so spoken communication was difficult. After a while, we decided that we would record something, and I actually got funding to make a CD that I have called Dhvani Sutras from which I took the piece I gave you for your compilation. But then they said

8  Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021). The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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that this CD must remain private, we are not sure what will happen if our gurus and our community will listen to this. We are not world-famous musicians, we are just locally known practitioners and we don’t want our reputation and chances of getting gigs to be harmed by the fact that we did such a crazy thing. BC: But if I remember correctly, in the 70s, Ali Akbar Khan produced a CD called Journey9 that was very innovative in the sense that the way he was presenting Sarod was in a way quite detached from the conventional Indian classical music tradition, which was remarkable. SB: Yeah, but he was Ali Akbar Khan already. BC: Okay. SB: I once collaborated on a project with Shubha Mudgal. Shubha has no hangovers about experimenting. She is famous enough in her own right; she is famous enough that she can decide what she wants to do and her reputation won’t suffer. But moderately well-known musicians from Pune—which is not one of the epicentres of classical music anyway—could maybe feel that this goes too far for their peers. And they also are not really plugged in to the dominant international English discourse and thus cannot justify what they are doing in an internationally compatible way. I have the CD lying around here. It exists. It exists in my shelf and it exists in Sameer’s university office, and whenever we find somebody trustworthy, we can give it to them. I can give one to you, but they are not sold commercially. We did continue the work itself and we actually have a second album ready now, but I did not hurry publish it: we just have the files which we may eventually publish on Bandcamp or something. So the musicians are all for this experimental work, they are totally invested and some say it is one of the best musical experiences in their career, but they hesitate for it to be seen in their community. When I give it away in Europe, it doesn’t bother them. They would be happy to play concerts in Europe or elsewhere with this kind of music, but when I suggest that we maybe should play concerts in India with this ensemble, they are very careful.

9

 Khan, Ali Akbar (1999). Journey (album). Triloka Records.

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BC: Few voices in India are standing out in terms of the kind of revolution in the sonic traditions and sound/music trajectories they envisage, like T. M. Krishna.10 SB: Yes, T. M. Krishna is very influential in this regard and he is interesting in the scene because he has actually built his reputation around innovation. L. Subramaniam and Zakir Hussain also have a public image as innovators, so there are few—but L. Subramanian and Zakir were famous already when they started off on this path. I believe T. M. Krishna was not very famous when he started innovating and he became well known because of it. But then again, he comes from Carnatic music which is already more familiar with experimental innovations than the Hindustani tradition. In Carnatic music, I find much more genuine cross-cultural experimentation than in Hindustani music. In cross-cultural experimentation, Hindustani music tends to move towards jazz and towards what they call fusion, which is usually less about a cross-cultural encounter than it is about a commodification of ‘Indianesque’ sonic elements into the dominant world music idiom. This is something very different from what today’s sound artists are looking for. There are people interested in going further, but it is usually very difficult to sustain if you are not already famous. BC: Yes, absolutely. I was thinking about why Pune musicians chose Fluxus and Gregorian chants. Perhaps it was because of their associations. Perhaps Gregorian chants opened up to their listening methodologies, the modal aspect of sound which was missing in later European musical evolving into baroque and classical traditions. This modality was very close to the Indian way of singing. And Fluxus was a very interesting example in which many of the American minimalist school composers such as La Monte Young, Mariane Zazeela and Terry Riley really drew from Indian sound traditions.11 More or less this often sounds like looting to me—

10  T. M. Krishna is a Ramon Magsaysay awarded Indian Carnatic vocalist, writer, activist, and author. As a vocalist, he has made major innovations in both style and substance of Carnatic music. 11  North Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, guru to American minimalists La Monte Young, Mariane Zazeela and Terry Riley had an astounding impact on the development of minimalist school of music. However, this impact is not adequately discussed, and the credits go to Young and his fellow students.

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appropriated and reproduced into something that is framed as Fluxus. SB: Yes, although I didn’t talk much about those people. I spoke more about Yoko Ono and Fluxus artist, but yes it still applies. I spoke about John Cage and people like that. In any case, it was a different scene but it was also a Fluxus scene. Mariane Zazeela definitely, Terry Riley and La Monte also I guess. There is a big study to be made. BC: I was going through different prominent Fluxus anthologies which are canonised. One of the most cited anthologies is the Fluxus Anthology in which Mariane Zazeela and La Monte Young contributed with a very distorted version of a raga. This is considered a pioneering and canonical work, but to an Indian listener who is exposed to Dhrupad, it sounds very distorted and not palatable. SB: You know that there is a CD out called I think Solo for Voice 58: 18 Microtonal Ragas? I am not sure, but it’s made by Amelia Cuni who is herself an Italian Dhrupad singer.12 BC: Okay, I will look for it, Solo for Voice 58: 18 Microtonal Ragas. I know that John Cage learned about raga music from a musician born in Ahmedabad. SB: I thought it was Ananda Coomaraswamy that he took most of his India things from.13 BC: Gita Sarabhai is her name. In 1948, Gita Sarabhai met John Cage, and Cage said, ‘I would like to learn Indian classical music from you and I’ll teach you Western classical music’. For 10 or 12 years, they exchanged music.14 In 1962, Gita Sarabhai was composing a piece which was a soundscape collage kind of thing—perhaps one of the first music concrete piece, which is not regarded so in the history.15 12  Listen: https://othermindsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/solo-for-voice-58-18microtonal-ragas 13  Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) was one of the great art historians of the twentieth century whose multifaceted writings deal primarily with visual art, aesthetics, literature and language, folklore, mythology, religion, and metaphysics, of Sri-Lankan origin, but spent most of his adult life in the US. 14  More on this significant historical connection will be discussed later in the book, and can be found in few other resources, e.g.Cage’s own admission: https://www.theculturium. com/john-cage-silence/ 15  Listen: https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/electronic-india-mooginterview-paul-purgas

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SB: That piece, is it available somewhere? BC: Yes, I heard the piece in Serendipity Arts Festival 2019—there was a curated show about ‘Counter Canons Counter Culture’, in which the researchers found out about those very interesting cross-­cultural interactions between West and East in terms of sound and music, film and media innovations. SB: Musicologist Nazeer Jairazbhoy, who wrote a lot about raga and Indian music, also made tape collage pieces—collages of Indian sounds and Indian music. His wife told me that he did this in the 60s or maybe a little bit later. But they are also not recognized in any way. BC: Yes, I know about his work. Gita Sarabhai did one of the earliest soundscape compositions in 1962, perhaps earlier than R. Murray Schafer. SB: That’s wonderful to hear. BC: My question would be, how do you like to think through the possibility of this intercultural exchange and confluence and what form might it take? SB: I don’t know if I can really think through it as it is happening right now. With people like you, like me who are conditioned in different traditions and have different sonic worlds in the back of our heads. What I wanted to say about the Western tradition being difficult in this regard is that confluence and exchange from the Western perspective already seems to be an old hat. There is no lack of people who went to India and recorded stuff and came back and did something with it. The trap here for Indian sound artists is falling into the same kind of attitude: to take the sounds of India as ‘exotic’ or to try to present Indian music as ‘exotic’ or something like this. It can be a challenge not to adopt the outsider’s perspective when you are not an outsider, but want to explain yourself to them. But I believe that the number of ‘inside’ people that are engaging to various degrees with something outside their usual scope is growing in the current global environment. Besides, the technologies that they now have at their disposal make it very easy for them to work with that. That is what I meant with the computer being a real breakthrough in this entire undertaking. You have a very low-cost studio at your fingertips at all times. That is a very different environment from the one I grew up in where a recording was a matter of several thousands of whatever currency you were in, at least three people,

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and a room full of equipment. You needed significant resources to even have a well-sounding recording. There are no publishing quality recordings of almost all my earlier performances up to roughly the late 90s because it was simply too expensive for me to finance a professional recording. That has completely changed and that means that you will see more of this work. However, I tend to not celebrate production alone in all this; people nowadays will always produce a lot of stuff. The question is who will listen to it? To what end and purpose will they listen to it? And that is where I am a little more sceptical, in the short run at least. To my knowledge or from my experience in many different environments, listening to experimental sound art of any kind, from anywhere, is a super-privileged minority pursuit and not something that captures the fancy of a wider population anywhere. The numbers are simply not large enough to warrant the label of ‘cultural movement’. It’s really more a nerdy pursuit that we undertake. That said the tendency seems to be for the nerds of the world to unite, to cluster. In some way, I don’t think that we have to theorise it that much because of the very fact that you don’t need massive resources to do it anymore. Movements can happen on their own and we haven’t seen that too much yet. But the question now is not—who controls the means of production? Almost everybody can produce music. But who can listen to something? Everybody can hear something. So the question is only, who will listen to what? And that is increasingly the question of our time. It is not so much, will the creators be canonised? I don’t know if that is the big question. The big question is who will make the effort to listen? And for what reason will they make the effort to listen? That for me is the challenge. I can observe it with myself. I am someone who has constantly produced a lot of music and sound art. And in this COVID year, I have started to not listen to anything anymore. People constantly send me links to stuff to listen to—and I don’t. I cannot attend live concerts; and live streams, I just don’t follow them because I am overwhelmed and I hate the listening situation that I am forced into—being at home, sitting at my desk, watching something to listen to on video, etc., which is exactly the way I don’t want to listen to music. I want to be in a space with people and have another part of life happening around me while I listen to music. BC: Yes, as a social space.

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SB:

I want to be in the social space. For me, music is interwoven with social presence. Just the music by itself may be an interesting mode but it is also what you might call ‘disembedded’. The question for us in all these environments is how we get people to listen? And that’s maybe the question of curation more than it is a question of production. And in curation, many former constraints have been removed through the fact that anything can be streamed from anywhere at any time. So curators are really at a new point in time where they are not constrained by almost anything. I just curated a concert in Montreal where 20 Australian composers, several African composers and local Quebec composers were all treated equally in a sense—they were all streamed and they were all from home, they streamed from home. BC: Their screen size is absolutely equal and zoomed. SB: Exactly. I don’t know what that engenders now. The statistics said there were several hundred people—it was in a context of a festival—so several hundred people from all around the world were watching, but the average attendance time was 40 minutes for a concert that took 4 hours. A good guess is that even those 40 minutes were not of focused listening—that they were writing, doing stuff and listening to the concert at the same time. It is a very different context that we are entering now that the production and access are not a significant problem anymore. There still are differences between locations, but they are not as vast as they used to be. This makes one question of curation central: how to make things audible that actually want to be listened to. BC: You argued in your keynote for the Curating Diversity conference last year (2020) at the Akademie der Kunste Berlin16 that the curators need to be performing wakefulness: so waking up to the globalised situation in which you need to encounter with all the different thought processes and the sound thinking. SB: It’s difficult, because on the other hand, one of the charms of being a curator—I am myself a curator too—was in getting to know people in person. So you would have this unique power to say, ‘There is this wonderful artist in Kenya. I want to meet that artist, and not only do I want to meet him, I want other people to meet that artist too.’ And I can organise the funds to get that artist in person to this  See: https://www.adk.de/en/programme/index.htm?we_objectID=61391

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location where I am and meet with them, not only listen to their music, but to meet with them, talk with them and have dinner with them. Music curation is usually not well paid, but it has these unique perk: you get to know super interesting people and you can basically choose who you want to have dinner with. From the other side, as an artist, I remember so many dinners that I was invited to by curators. We had super interesting conversations and it was very clear that for them, that conversation was the highlight of our interaction. My concert was fine but sometimes they didn’t even appear at the concert because they already knew my music well and had to attend to other urgent matters—but they did want to get to know me as a person. And if you take away all that, maybe curating is not such an interesting proposition anymore. I think there is a whole interplay of sociality and art that has not really been understood and we are slowly discovering, in the forced separation of all these things, what we are actually interested in. In this situation, can closed circles still dominate the global discourse like they used to in the history of modernism in music?—Vienna, New York, Darmstadt, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles? I don’t think they can. I fear that local communities in contemporary music are in danger of atrophying because you can almost do anything with anyone. If I want to, I can now collaborate with someone in Denpasar or New  York or in Anchorage or Dakar or Moscow without any problems of visas or travel. That means that we are rapidly entering into a very intermingled and dispersed producing as well as listening experience. But actually listening to the local—that I think is going to be a crucial challenge. BC: Yes, listening with the locals. SB: There are many YouTube videos now where you can see indigenous audiences listening to opera for the first time on headphones in their village. I think a lot of sonic interchange of that kind will continue to happen and I am curious what the outcome will be. BC: Yes, the process of globalisation in sound which brought different sound practices into interaction with each other was accelerated in this COVID time because there was a sudden flux of online interactions and that brought us also to a question of identity. Identity is a very crucial factor when territorial activities take place. And also on a really personal level, how do I present my work as a global artist? Am I a global artist with an aspiration for universalization? Also

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at the same time universality is a problematic idea because then the diverse epistemic systems of the globe are reduced to the level of homogeneity. At the same time, I am also questioning whether there is some sort of Indian-ness or South Asian-ness or even Asian identity on me in terms of my skin colour, intonation, accent, etc. This interplay of identities in the complex ways of identifications makes a national identity problematic, starting with the name itself. Yeah, with the name itself. I grew up in Germany and you can see my skin is almost white. I mean, it would pass as white under most current circumstances, but my name isn’t, and that is just a quirk. My father had fairly dark skin but somehow I have very light skin. In this context of the music world, I was always the Indian, but I’ve been relabelled as different kinds of Indian many times in my life. I was the Bavarian Indian when I studied, then I became the Prussian Indian when I was in Berlin, and now I am officially a Canadian-­ Indian. Because of COVID, I’ve been living in Zurich for eight months now, but already some journalist has called me a Swiss-­ Indian composer. I am alien to all of these locales in some way and I am also locally anchored in some of them. My wife was born in Berlin so for us as a family, there are deep roots in Berlin. Yet, I myself have never lived there for long enough to qualify as a Berliner in an emphatic, social sense; I am in no way a recognised part of the arts and music scene there, either. So all these complex issues of identity intermingle but for me, this has led to the observation that identity is overrated. I think identitarian discourses are not only misleading, they are actually quite dangerous and we can see that in a political realm, but it is also the same in the artistic realm. We see it also if you look back in time—is Chopin a Polish or a French composer? Who cares? Is Ravi Shankar Indian or American? Or Ali Akbar Khan—he lived in California for most of his life. Is he an American composer of new music? Does it matter? Of course, there are cultural signifiers, there are codes and there are preferences. I am from a Gujarati family, I love Gujarati food. All these things come together and compose you but what I contend is that it is not so different for someone who has lived in one location all their life. Their identity is also cobbled together from many sources. There is essentially no difference to our identities; it is just that in mine, it sticks out more that I have composed myself from so many different things and that I continue to recompose myself all the time.

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You do the same thing if you live in the same town all your life: you get to know new people, you get to know new institutions, you read new books, you encounter people from another walk of life, and you constantly recompose yourself. So you think you are one unit but no one is a unit. I think identity, seeking who one is, is really a complex question for every artist but the question of identity can almost never be answered by referring to some ready-­made identity such as a community, nationality, culture or belief system. Like music, identity remains ephemeral. BC: In territorial terminology and methodologies, identities play a role in the sense that you need to get a Kenyan artist or you need to get an aboriginal Australian or indigenous artist. This ‘indigenous’ labelling is debatable, as in indigenous sound studies suddenly exploding with Dylan Robinson’s book Hungry Listening.17 These kinds of identification are problematic since they are always in a territorial mode of conduct. It brings us to the colonial practice of bringing some non-White subjects from the colonies to show in an exhibition. SB: Like a ‘human zoo’. BC: Kind of an extension of the human zoo, but this curatorial strategy is something one may ponder. SB: Yeah and it is really problematic for many artists. My wife was a curator at the House of World Cultures in Berlin for many years. The problem always was that in an exhibition about contemporary Mexican art, the artists didn’t want to be called Mexican artists; they wanted to be called artists. Then it turns out that you have ten Iranian artists none of whom lives in Iran any more. And the Iranian embassy protests that this is not a show on Iranian art because they are all dissidents. It is the same thing with China and almost every authoritarian country. And then a show about contemporary arts in India generated another flashpoint: in an exhibition in 2003, where I was involved as a curator for music, the German public didn’t like the show because its Indian curators never showed them an exotic India. There were leather-bound club chairs, a naked Subodh Gupta interrogating his homosexuality. Social tendencies that everybody knew from their own city were presented in their Indian incarna17  Robinson, Dylan (2020). Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

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tion. They were differently approached, but there was never a sense of an exotic encounter. Even though one could hear their Indian accents or see in their skin colours that the protagonists were not Scandinavians. But it wasn’t exotic enough for the public. And I curated a programme where I invited Indian musicians to compose something for a new music ensemble, to be performed during this show. One of the pieces was by Dr Ashok Ranade who made a sound collage from his ethnological field recordings of indigenous music, but also of sitar’s tuning, and of conch shells. He said, ‘I want you to transcribe this for orchestra’ which I then did, with some difficulty. The reaction of the audience was, ‘This is clearly Western music because it sounds not Indian at all. How is it Indian music?’ And I said, ‘Well, it is a sound collage made of sounds from India, and I’ve transcribed them as faithfully as I could into the orchestral setting. This was the task I was given by the Indian composer, it wasn’t my idea, I was just an executor’. There was a real debate about whether this is Indian music or not and it all hinged on the question of sonic identity. How can a sound be Indian if we don’t recognise it as Indian? But do we really have to have acceptable and recognisable markers of Indian sonic identity throughout any work by an Indian sound artist? I find this a very dangerous proposition for any art. Why would you look for markers of German-ness in Wagner, it doesn’t make any sense. What would these be? They can only be stereotypes anyway; they can never enlighten you in any way that is interesting, so why would you look for them? BC: Yes. Going forward, I think that two ideas would be very helpful to challenge this identification mode in curation, and also the presentation and showcasing of sound works. They would be the idea of ‘homelessness’ that Vilém Flusser talks about,18 and a similar idea of ‘deterritorialisation’ used by Deleuze and Guattari on how you are detached from the site, related to disembedding—how the identities can be detached from the body and reconfigured through different phenomenological contexts.19  Flusser, Vilem (2002). writings (Erik Eisel Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.  Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1986). Nomadology: The War Machine. Trans. Brian Massumi. Cambridge: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1972/2004). Anti-Œdipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum. 18 19

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You mentioned at the beginning that the Europeans needed to free themselves in order to become colonisers, so we’re on a slippery slope there. There is another word coined in the queer debate called ‘dis-identification’. That is another very important term, especially if you don’t want to identify with what people think you identify with. I’ve written a small text, I don’t know if you’ve read it, called ‘Native Aliens’. BC: No, I don’t know it. Is it possible to find it? SB: I can send it to you, it’s in a book. I can send you the pdf. I think homelessness is not the right word because no one is truly homeless in the sense that they don’t know where they feel at home. The only problem is that a home is usually understood as something that you are born into. It is not something that you can acquire later in life, and it is certainly not something of which you can have more than one. But one indeed can have more than one home, and this glorification of the home as a bubble in which you must want to be most of the time to me speaks only of a lack of imagination or a lack of experience. I think everybody who has lived through life for a certain amount of time knows that almost everyone goes through several homes. For some reason, this idea is not ideologically acceptable to many. But the reality is that everybody has several homes, and they feel at home in this place as much as they feel at home in the other place, and you can oscillate between them. More and more people realise that they are such native aliens, while others cling to the ideology of home and what I call nativism. BC: I think Flusser’s argument was not about being without a home, but more about a momentary mode of disassociation that will help you to feel a kinship with others similar to you. This kinship is very important that only those who are not locally embedded (e.g. a tribal populace) can understand. They relate and empathise with each other by putting on other’s shoes. It is very important that you can put on another’s shoes and empathise with them. Only in a momentary mode of homelessness can you detach yourself and look at it from a holistic perspective so that you can empathise with others. SB: I am not entirely convinced because you can also say the opposite: if you are very rooted, it costs you nothing to empathise with anyone else, as there is no danger of you losing yourself. And if you are in flux and disembedded, then there is a tendency to be defensive

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about identity. I think the problem of populism and national identitarianism is a side effect of up-rootedness. Disembedded people become defensive about their roots and glorify them in a ­disproportionate manner. But if you know that you are where you are, who you are, you can just open up to the other because there is no danger of your self being determined by them. In Paris, as a student, I lived with a landlady in her 80s. In her youth, she had travelled the entire world with a backpack—from the 1940s onwards. She had seen a large part of the world, but she didn’t speak one word of any language except French. She was adamant about her French identity; she would always correct every French language or etiquette mistake I made. But she had travelled the entire world, and had friends everywhere constantly keeping contact with her. She knew about and empathised with social causes all over the entire world, and had gotten by everywhere on only French and sign language. For me, this too was an exemplary way of being in the world. She was not a university-educated woman, had worked as a low-level government employee, was not polyglot and she didn’t really appreciate being anything else than what she was. But she was utterly curious about how others are, what they are and she would theorise and think about it and even in her 80s, she was still very open and an activist for human rights causes. She was just curious about the world. Living with her cleansed me of some preconceptions that I had about how you need to be in the world and about the glorification of one’s own unrootedness. In German, there is a nice word which translates not so well into other languages. It is called Haltung—a fundamental ethical framework that mediates between inner conviction and public stance. If you have a certain open Haltung, then it doesn’t matter if you are rooted or not rooted or whether you have a cultural identity or not: you will be able to engage in productive ways with another person or idea or way of life. BC: This idea of home might not be necessarily nationalistic or identitarian, but home as the inner sanctum where you are attuned with yourself—that is your home. You carry your home even though you are travelling. This is a more abstract sense of home that one can be content with. SB: Of the ‘native aliens’ I have worked with, the person who impressed me most was born in Benin. He had to leave his home when he was

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12 and was sent to live with another family far away because his own family was too poor. As an adolescent, he then took off and wandered on foot across the African continent until he came to Israel, where he lived for some years, and after further wanderings, he now lives in Norway as a family father, a successful musician and theatre performer. A wonderful person, he is quiet and able to project to other people a very worldly sense of being here but not being bothered. When I met him, I thought I would be like that when I get old. He had no native home anymore, no ancestral family home, no tribal home, nothing in that sense. Since the age of 12, he had been thrown out into the world and he had to survive anywhere. He worked menial jobs wherever he went just to get through the country, and was repeatedly persecuted. You can imagine how his being in Europe left him exposed to many racialised encounters. But he still felt to me like one who is very much at home. BC: The final question, to wrap up, I was thinking about your idea of the audience. How do you engage with them as a performer, as a composer communicating your work to potential audiences? Is it through a sense of entertainment or is it through participation, interaction or responsiveness? What is the mode in which you engage? I see there are differences in audience engagements in different listening traditions. For example, in Indian classical music, there is a sense of participation, in the Middle East, it is even more apparent that without the participation of the audience an Oud player cannot perform, and also Tarab is the participation celebrated—it is all in being together that you perform with the audience. But in the Western tradition, there is a consumptive mode in which you present a piece as a product, and that product is consumed by a potential audience sitting in a concert hall or in the form of a mass-produced album. How do you like to see your own perspective on audience engagement? SB: Again, I am not very dogmatic there. I think all of these ways of musicking have something good about them. I can notice this because I sometimes desire this and sometimes that. It depends on a number of factors of the time that I am in. So when I myself can desire all these different modes of engagement—I am not special in any way—so probably anybody can have the same range of desires of engagement. That means that they are all legitimate ways of engaging with the audience. I think the packaged consumable way

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can be a very good way if you are in a certain mood and I think the interactive and participatory way can also be a very beautiful way of engaging with music. What I do in my practice is just to do it ­differently in each piece. There are pieces, which are totally geared to the classical concert situation and other pieces that can never be performed in such a situation because the musician and the audience are indistinguishable from one another and both have to play their role in order to make the piece happen. And now Corona has added another layer. I had a rehearsal project in December where I met three musicians under COVID restrictions. We could never be close to each other and we had two days to present something. All throughout, people could watch us on Zoom and comment and offer suggestions and this continued through the concert because there were some pieces where we asked the audience for prompts on Zoom. And I found it an interesting modality, subverting the prevalent broadcasting of things in our days and it had a huge charm for me, to be part of that process. But I also like it when, in a very conventional mode, I send a score to an ensemble, they record it and I get the recording. I don’t have any say in the interpretation, I am not involved, and the score contains enough information for them to realise a recording. I think these are different engagements with different audiences. For me, musicians are part of the audience—they are the first audience that needs to be convinced that it is worth to do something. The audience can be engaged in many ways. I also write and read and do podcasts and everything in order to engage with an audience. I’d like to look at it more like a theatre director. For a theatre director, once you enter into the performative situation, there is nothing that is not artistically meaningful. That means that if there is a chair standing in the room where you are, if you acknowledge its existence, it is a prop, if you don’t acknowledge its existence, this is also meaningful. Whatever you do, you cannot evade the production of meaning. Very early in my curatorial career, I argued for the fact that we should consider every event a form of meaning production—à part entière, that everything in and around it produces some kind of meaning. And if you want to nudge it towards a specific meaning, you should curate the entire encounter—from the invitation to the way home. Many festival curators do exactly that, but concert environments in new music are very often left uncurated because the

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music apparently speaks for itself. I don’t believe that. I like to curate concerts (and my own pieces), where everything is meant to contribute to a certain artistic effect. Whether the audience engages with it or not is another question, but from my side, nothing about the performance should be done unreflectedly. That’s pretty totalitarian in one sense, but on the other hand, it opens up a lot of opportunities for the audiences to plug themselves in. I once devised a concert with this four-hour piano performance with 36 of my pieces, and I exhibited the entire score of many hundred pages in the foyer with a snack station under each score spread. And in the frequent breaks, people would go there for a snack or a drink but they would also look at the score and wonder, have they already heard this piece or not? I also wrote poems instead of explanatory texts—a poem for each piece—and these poems were installed in the space. I put these poems on the chairs so you would sit on a chair and it would have a random poem, and at some point, it would turn up to be a poem that inspired one of the pieces or was inspired by one of the pieces. BC: Is it something in this idea that is drawing from your Indian listening exposure? SB: In some way yes, but I wanted to say that even a normal piano evening is just not just a piano evening for me. It is not just a recital where I leave all the trappings as they are and I say, ‘okay people will do it as they always do’ and I am really focused only on getting the right sound from the piano. That is not how I see the experience and that is certainly informed by these Elphinstone college concert that I went to as a youth where it was always a totally immersive experience to be involved in music. Maybe that is what I wanted in this particular thing to happen too, where you cannot separate the sonic experience from the social experience, from the food and from the literary experience. That is certainly always an important factor for me. BC: Maybe you are drawing from your experience in Mumbai, Pune and other cities of India. SB: Yes it could be. But not only that, I wouldn’t localise it in that way. It is not an accident that when European music was at its most exclusive that the concept of the summer festival came about. The Salzburg Festival, Darmstadt Festival and all these festivals are nothing but social events. I mean people go there for the music,

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but that’s only half the truth because they want to go there for the experience and for the peer group and for the beautiful mountains and idyllic towns. The Salzburg festival as the prototype of the modern festival to which people will travel in order to worship the gods of art was created by theatre director Max Reinhardt. What he had done before the First World War is more than what I am doing right now—he devised immense immersive theatre experiences for thousands of visitors—pageants that lasted an entire day. There are photos of his gigantic sets all over the world, Berlin, Rome, Paris, New York: he would build an entire village and you would enter into the village and basically be one of the villagers in the play. Or you would watch a religious drama in the pews of a church and take part in the rituals. That was revolutionary in 1912, and then after the war, he started the Salzburg festival where the centrepiece is an open-air performance on the central plaza of the city. He was totally aware of all these connections between the listening experience, the situation of the audience, the social and the artistic framing. I think that this open air theatre was a counter-reaction to this closing-in of the winterly experience in inner-city boxes. All these summer festivals are events where reconnection with the community, with nature, with the seasons, is of paramount importance. Tanglewood in upstate New York is a magical place, and music is just one of the things that is magical about it. You see that same desire in the Western tradition too; it is not something that only comes from the Indian tradition. It is just that for me in my practice I want to build it partly into the piece itself, it shouldn’t remain something of happenstance for some organizer to do it or not. BC: With that I think we can wrap up our conversation. It was such a pleasure.

CHAPTER 4

Rajesh K. Mehta

The conversation with Mehta was organized via Zoom in 2020 as the plan to meet in person was curtailed due to the travel restrictions. Mehta later edited the transcription for coherence and clarity. BC:

How did you come to work with sound and experimenting in a context of contemporary music and sound art? Please provide a personal background. What were the specific catalysts for your interest in working with sound? RM: My first exposure to experimental music and avant-garde jazz was between 1982 and 1986 in Boston while I was studying Humanities and Engineering at MIT. I heard concerts from the MIT experimental music studio, heard lectures on AI and music from pioneers such as Marvin Minsky, and heard avant-garde jazz concerts with jazz greats such as Jimmy Giuffre and was mentored by the MIT Jazz lecturer, avant-garde trumpeter/composer and minister Mark Harvey. My own musical practice at the time was however rather ‘conventional’. I played in MIT ensembles (concert jazz band as a lead trumpet player and the brass ensemble playing sixteenth-­ century music). It was only around 1989 that an entire world of sound exploration opened up to me as a guest student at the Mills Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Rajesh K. Mehta—RM. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_4

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College contemporary music programme in Oakland, California. I spent a year in Anthony Braxton’s composition seminar and in parallel performed in many student projects. I was exposed to the world of contemporary music and avant-garde jazz and discovered contemporary composers such as Xenakis, Ligeti, Penderecki, Lutoslawski, as well Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) musicians (Leo Smith, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams). I also heard live concerts of minimalist composers such as Terry Riley with Pandit Pran Nath, Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, and attended lectures and concerts by John Cage and Lou Harrison. In parallel, I worked in an industrial acoustics lab in San Francisco doing research for making silencers for industrial fans and ran a tutoring agency in Mathematics and the Sciences. It was around this time that I began experimenting with the trumpet and discovering new sonic possibilities. It was natural for me to see the trumpet as an acoustical device and to analyse how sound flows through it and how the mechanisms in the trumpet work. The noise reduction studies in the acoustics lab also opened me up to a certain beauty that I heard in pure noise that I was using to test acoustical models. This led to deconstructing the trumpet and to my later hybrid trumpet innovations. BC: Who were the inspirations for your work with sound? Is there anyone from India/South Asia? RM: Despite hailing from North India and having discovered the beauty of Hindustani Classical music first, in 1989, I fell in love with South Indian (Carnatic) music, especially the microtonal and rhythmic—innovative aspects of that tradition. Also, the devotional aspect of Carnatic music also moved me and added a spiritual depth to my understanding of sound. I was inspired by many Hindustani and Carnatic musicians such as Vilayat Khan, Nikhil Banerjee as well as Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar both of whom I had the good fortune to hear live on multiple occasions. Among Carnatic musicians, I was inspired by violinist M.S. Gopalakrishnan, Mridangist Palghat Mani Iyer, vocalist M.S. Subbulakshmi among many others as well as the south Indian temple musicians. The way the temple musicians play the double reed instrument, the nadaswaram, had a decisive impact on my trumpet playing. This inspiration led me to start playing the Firebird slide trumpet originally made for Maynard Ferguson in 1998 and then this developed into

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the creation of my microtonal trumpet innovation the ‘Naga Phoenix’ made for me by an American trumpet maker in Singapore in 2010. I remember a very interesting concert of experimental music integrating a South Indian musical element in 1989 with David Rosenboom, Anthony Braxton and South Indian mridangam maestro Trichy Sankaran. I later formed a trio called ‘Innovative Music Meeting’ with Trichy Sankaran and Sri Lankan contemporary music Cellist Rohan de Saram, who was a founding member of the Arditti String Quartet. We toured in Europe and I co-­produced a CD of that group with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Of all the musicians of South Asian origin with whom I have worked, Rohan is the one who is most steeped in contemporary musical practice and I have performed with him for over 20 years in various formations. BC: How is the sound culture in India different from the European/ Western canon in your opinion? What are the basic differences in sound thinking between East and West? RM: I think that the focus on the development of a personal sound is greater in Classical Indian musical traditions and in jazz, which are both improvised musical traditions. It is part and parcel of developing a voice in improvisational music traditions. Of course, there is this aspect in classical European music too, but I would say to a lesser extent as it is dictated by the interpretation of composed music with generally no improvisational elements. When one looks at contemporary composed music as well as avant-garde jazz/ improvised music, the focus on the range of sonic exploration and expansion is even greater and the boundaries between pitch and noise are blurred. The architecture of Western music is still more ‘vertical’ and based on harmonic and polyphonic thinking. I see Indian music as more ‘horizontal’ where microtonal ornamentation and rhythmic permutations within Ragas are the engines of an unfolding melodic/rhythmic counterpoint in contrast to Harmonic Western Classical music. Since the 1960s, there have been a lot more crossover projects in modern music where the cultural influences from India are foundational inspirations. The Indian music influence on Terry Riley and John Coltrane, as well as the Buddhist philosophical influence on John Cage, come to mind. BC: What do you think of as ‘sound canon’ in the Indian context? What are the pre-modern sound systems and listening approaches in your opinion? Do you like to challenge notions such as ‘tradi-

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tion’? Do you think these canons of sonic thoughts and systems were gradually erased through colonisation? RM: I have been impressed and influenced by the Hindu concept of Anahata Nada, the so-called unstruck sound.1 Anahata Nada is the name given to the cosmic sound or the so-called white noise that is omnipresent without being actively made in a way that one can perceive. This understanding of sound as the source of creation I believe is foundational to an understanding of Indian music. I think colonisation led to the increased commercialisation of music, but what is remarkable in India is that there are still living traditions that have been relatively unscathed, for example, the South Indian temple music in which the tradition has remained intact for centuries. BC: Do you locate certain tendencies in your own work that draw on ideas from the Indian canon or traditional sound culture in India? Are there any? RM: My explorations with microtonality and metric cycles as an improviser and composer have been greatly influenced especially by South Indian classical and Temple music. BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of time (duration, temporality) in your work? Does it expand the Western concept of musical time and durationality? RM: Time has been a crucial component in my work and I have performed with percussionists from many musical traditions, especially with South Indian music, which has influenced my musical language as a trumpet player and resulted in different trumpet innovations that integrate those influences. My ‘drumpet’ is an instrument that allows me to play Indian-inspired rhythmic patterns more easily as well as my ‘naga phoenix’ slide trumpet, which allows me to engage in bending pitches in an Indian music vein. I have been focused on ‘continuous microtonality’ which is more prevalent in non-Western music than the ‘discrete microtonality’ where music is designed with fixed microtonal intervals performed by instruments such as the quarter-tone trumpet. Formally, I have made graphical scores and use my own notational approach to cap1  Anahata nada is a sound that is omnipresent and all-pervasive, even when it is not made to sound. In Sanskrit language, anahata means ‘un-struck’ or ‘unbeaten’ and nada means ‘to flow’.

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ture some of those Indian musical aspects in my pieces, which still largely centre around the art of improvisation. BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of space (aural perspective, depth of field) in your work? Does it defy the Western ideas around spatiality? How do you conceptualise the idea of improvisation in your work? Do you work with microtonality and Shrutis found in Indian classical music? How do you like to relate to these ritual and customary aspects of Indian sound culture, and how do you innovate on your own terms? The idea of ‘sound art’ departs from a typical Western musical tradition where tonal structures are discreet and quantifiable; how do you interpret the Indian system of microtonality that is ‘immeasurable’ and there are ‘unknowable’ hidden between microtones? Do these ideas and other Indian sonic aspects reflect in your work? RM: I was greatly influenced by the fields of architecture and dance, having collaborated with practitioners in both fields. I have performed and recorded in many architectural spaces with unusual acoustics, often with different kinds of echo/extended reverberation times. I used to begin my music with movement performances while working with contemporary dance companies in France in the early 90s. My ongoing music-architecture project series ‘Sounding Buildings’ integrates the acoustic and navigation possibilities of unusual buildings. BC: When you use electronics or recording technology, how do you like to replace the deeply anthropogenic, improvisatory, ephemeral, nature-inclined and (inter-)subjective ideas of performing arts embedded in Indian thoughts? RM: My musical approach is to abstract from my Indian musical inspirations using both visual methods in a pre-compositional phase via the practice of drawing and through extended sonic forms on the trumpet, which span the range from pitch to noise. I have used special recording techniques in order to capture both the antiphonal aspects of my double-belled instruments, which emit sound through multiple sources and also the microtonal nuances from various deconstructions of the trumpet. BC: Do you think there is a confluence of cultures, between East and West, and between Global North and South in your work? How do you identify yourself? Do you like to see yourself as a global entity? Please elaborate on your encounters with seminal

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figures in the sound art and new music field like John Cage, La Monte Young. Do you have any opinions regarding their influence on your work? How did you like to find your own place in this field? RM: My work is hybrid and is both intercultural and interdisciplinary. My biography of having lived roughly equally on three continents (North America, Europe, and Asia) is reflected in my various musical expressions. I feel a part of the Indian diaspora but perhaps more even as a global citizen, having had the opportunity of living in so many different countries. I had the privilege of attending concerts of some leading new music composers in person. I saw John Cage on multiple occasions between 1989 and 1991. I attended a lecture in the Oakland Museum on his graphical work, saw the premiere of a new collaborative work with his partner dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham and his ‘Europera’ in Zürich. I saw Gyorgy Ligeti’s ‘Le Grande Macabre’ in Amsterdam and Atmospheres in Zürich. I also recall concerts and lectures with composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Terry Riley and Lou Harrison. I would say that all of these composers opened up my understanding of musical expression and encouraged me to find my own musical voice. BC: What is your comment on Western colonisation of South Asia and its sonic culture? How do you like to decolonise sounds in your own work, if possible? RM: I recently performed a piece called ‘Black Fractions’ in the Global Trumpets Festival at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, with my Sky Cage quartet.2 The piece was my first artistic reflection on racism and I wrote text combined with historical information about the 3/5ths Compromise. The text was recorded by an African-American singer. The primary focus was on the effect of colonialism and the aftermath of the colonial enterprise that led to the enslavement of Africans and the trade, which led to oppressive reality of slavery in the United States. This theme of racism as a remnant of the colonial enterprise is something that I will continue to engage with in my music.

2  See: https://www.folkwang-uni.de/home/hochschule/aktuell/vollanzeige/news-­ detail/global-trumpets-festival-2/

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How do you engage with the audience? Do you like to entertain them? RM: I am a performer and so it is vital to connect with the audience and my main goal is to engage with an audience on a deeper level, hoping that the musical expression engages the audience both emotionally and intellectually. Entertaining an audience is not my primary objective. However, I don’t see anything wrong if an audience can find some aspects of a performance ‘entertaining’, and as an improviser, the moments where an audience enjoys the music-­ making can feed into the music-making being more engaged.

CHAPTER 5

Sharif Sehnaoui

This conversation was recorded in the garden of Sursock Museum Beirut in 2019. At the corner of the garden, there was a solitary bench, on which we were sitting and talking, while Sharif rolling his cigarettes. Visitors were passing by the site of our conversation; their footsteps were recorded too. BC: This interview is for a project I am developing as a part of my extended post-doc. The project examines the sonic perspectives from the Global South with scholarly entry points like decoloniality, and East–West sonic confluence. To begin with, I would like to ask you about your background: how did you come to experimental music and experimentations with sound. How did you start and where did you start? What was the spark for you to begin artistic practice with sound? SS: For me the trigger was actually quite common and a pretty frequent and easy shift from jazz to free jazz, which triggered the whole chain to experimental music, to improvisation, to contemporary classical and then to sound arts. Basically, the whole nebula of non-conventional sound and music practices, but the first real trigger was definitely free jazz. I was a jazz lover and was studying it as a musician. That was the starting point of a whole journey. At that time, my jazz teachers encouraged me to go towards free jazz Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay–BC; Sharif Sehnaoui–SS. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_5

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but they were also worried that I would go too far and they were right to be worried. BC: You also started from an Arabic music context, right? SS: Not really. Arabic music was the background for me since I was a child because I grew up in Lebanon. So it has always been there. I never practised it or intended to practice it. I think I am coming from a specific scope of Lebanese culture where we lean more towards occidental music than oriental. You have a graduation here for people who are totally into tradition. Some people are allergic to oriental music, to the extent that they hate it. Some Lebanese people can be really pathologically against oriental music and will have an immediate reaction. If you play popular Arabic songs, they feel bad. And this has to do with identity. Luckily, I was never in that extreme and on the contrary, I always enjoyed Arabic music. BC: In terms of inspiration, did any of the sound pioneers from the East, the Middle East or South Asia inspire you? SS: South Asia or South-East Asia was always pretty far for me. It is not a culture, which I absorbed until very late. When I started listening to South-East Asian music, I was already a practising musician. But with regard to the masters of Oriental or Arabic or middle Eastern music, not really, no. It was very much a matter of tradition. There were people who were perpetuating specific traditions, maybe slightly improving it and making variations. And some of these variations are genius. Today I really like listening to this but there was no major innovation or major desire from the Oriental music practitioners to leap forward. The most radical of that would be radical by leaping even more backwards and trying to reclaim the Maqām1 in its origin, in its source—to recreate it as it was before modernity. This movement is really interesting and strong. There are people doing really amazing things trying to recapture the origin of this music. For me, in the beginning, the intention was to play Jazz, but then it was to innovate, create new languages and to take any musical identity and flip it over or play it in a different way to make it evolve. In the very beginning, to even strip music from music completely and get to sound actually. And there were points 1  Maqām isa set of pitches and quintessential melodic elements, or motifs, and a traditional pattern of musical use. Maqām is the principal melodic concept in Middle Eastern musical thought and practices.

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where, for instance, I was much more experimental and much less musical than I am now. But music came back. I like how these things mix, how much and in what ways the identities merge. So you could be doing music, you could be doing sound—music is sound and sound is also music in a way. In my opinion, this is easy to say but not easy to think. Rather it is much harder to think than you would like to believe—how this area between music and sound is blurred. The distinction between music and sound is not as clear as it seems. At some point, I think this was actually what I was focusing on and then the whole picture became different. BC: It is something to do with nature and culture. Culture is often defined as the folding of nature with human intervention. When human beings mediate nature, it becomes culture. Maybe it is human intervention in sound that makes it music, as a transformation from nature to culture. SS: Yes, but I have nothing against considering a sound which has no human intervention, as music. You might argue it is not music because it is not produced by a person but I am free to hear it as music. That’s my choice. Maybe it does not fit the definition of music. And then we can argue about the definition of music and this is an endless vicious circle. But in any case it does not matter if it is music or not. What matters is perception. BC: As you clearly stated, you are least interested in the so-called oriental canon of musical experimentations. But there were sonic experimentations, right? There were people who were experimenting with the transcendental aspect of sound—Tarab, for example. And these microtonal experiments were not common with the Western Canon, in the field of duration, improvisation, tonal experimentation. Going to a deeper aspect of tonality or of sound are sort of the characteristics of ‘Oriental Music’, for example, South Asian music or Javanese music. Were you not interested to understand these layers of historicity of musical experimentation in microtonality? When one hears your work from outside, enters it from a historically neutral position, the arresting moments are the microtonal experiments that you do with guitar. Don’t you think that there is a connection? SS: Yes, there is, and it came much later actually. I was referring to the beginning of my experimentations, but yes, the catalyst for me was when I relocated here after a long period of living in Paris. I got

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into the most experimental part of Oriental music in the 50s, 60s and 70s, along the Egyptian big names of Tarab, Abdel Halim, Abdel Wahab2 and Omar Khorshid.3 I dug into all these people about ten years ago when I relocated here and for sure, it had a strong influence on me. What made me sad simultaneously was how little of the spirit stayed after this era, and even how little of Tarab stayed in the Arab world as a canon because it was a canon at that time and now it is in the periphery of Arab culture. It is no longer at the heart of it. But for me the most interesting thing is that now Arabic music has put itself in this movement again, experimenting and creating an independent music culture, an independent music thinking. Trying to avoid the canon and intending to evolve in order to think of oriental music from a completely different perspective of an innovative practice. And this has been happening for the last ten years in my opinion but not more. This revival in a way, for me, is the most fascinating thing happening now. Even more fascinating than my own work, I would say. BC: Coming from a very strongly entrenched European tradition, living in Paris, working with Jazz, do you think that the European influences are something that you started with? It made your ground and then you got exposure to oriental music. How do these two fields intersect? Do you find there is something conflicting between these two traditions as you experience both deeply? SS: I have actually come to a point where I don’t divide between East and West at least on a musical level. For me the same musical elements can be found here and there. It is a matter of perspective and cultural policy. It is a complicated topic but for me, in my own trajectory, I tried to play rock but I did not feel that it was my music. I tried to play Jazz, but I did not feel that it was my music. And I am pretty sure if I try to play only traditional Maqām, I will feel this is not my music either. So from early on I tried to think what it means when I do not feel any affiliation to any style of music, from wherever it maybe from around the globe? It means that I need to develop my own kind of music, which can draw influ2  Mohammed Abdel Wahab Mohammed Abd el-Wahaab (1907–1991) was a prominent Arab Egyptian singer and composer of the twentieth century. 3  Omar Khorshid was an Egyptian surf guitarist with an innovative musical career that brought new sounds to the Middle Eastern musical landscape.

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ences from here and there. And in best cases find connecting points between things that seem very far apart but are actually the same, and also take sound as a source—like pure sound. For instance, Gnawa music4 or African Pygmy music:5 Pygmy music is a specific form of plastic sound. If you do not take it as a specific culture but a pure sound, then you will relate to it, because it is vibrations from material like wood. Different kinds of densities of wood would give different sounds, and all these sounds for me are interesting. As long as you take it as a source, it no longer matters whether it is oriental, Western or African or Asian. It is sound. So if you speak about microtonality, for instance, it is a fascinating phenomenon of sound because of physical reasons in the way it is actually produced. I do not know whether I like microtonality because it is a beautiful sound phenomenon or whether because it is Arabic, and I am Arabic. I have no idea. I don’t think it is because I am an Arab, I think it’s just beautiful sound. I am interested to mix all the sound phenomena and turn them into music but the looser it is, more the boundaries are open, the better it is for me. BC: Microtonality is not only an Arabic phenomenon. It is a question of attention and duration—how much time you keep a sound note exposed for perception. So this attention and durationality were much more experimented with in the so-called Eastern culture for historical reasons. I mean, before the colonial connections between East and West, before say 1400, there were less exchanges; cultural and musical traditions were demarcated by geologic reasons, and embedded in geographic locations. But pre-globalisation, globalisation and post-globalisation, these difference stages of global interactions have made these influences merge and coalesce more and made sound as different from music. Sound and music met and the boundaries blurred. I am trying to find out if there are traces because what we have now is not a cultural demarcation but only traces—these are traces of particular sonic traditions. And we pick up the traces to redefine in some ways.

4  Gnawa music is a form of Moroccan and West African Islamic religious songs and rhythms that combine ritual poetry with traditional music and dancing. 5  Pygmy music refers to sub-Saharan African music practices of the Central African communities.

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Yes, I think we all are left with our traces now if you look at it from let’s say a broader perspective, in the post-globalised world, Yes, I agree with you. I was once asked what do you think is specific to music in present times. It was asked in an interview and I think this was one of the most difficult questions that I was ever faced with. The questions were sent to me by emails so I had the time to think. And I think I found my answer after a while and then kept thinking about it. If you remove politics and strategies, for instance, a policy of France to boost French artists, or a policy of America or UK, so that they become more present, you boost their presence and this is really what politics is in music. And you cannot have this kind of politics here in Lebanon because the Lebanese state will never have a policy to boost Lebanese artists, at least not in the near future. So if you take the global present time in music and you remove politics then you also remove strategies. For instance, a strategy to boost ‘world music’—say to boost traditional Ethiopian music—and then you have this big branding, this big label, managing companies, PR companies, who will push the product. A bit like this picture of Peter Gabriel’s new world branding. So you remove the strategies, you remove the politics, then what is the present time? And my answer was that it is the first time in history where all of the times are present simultaneously and on the same level. What I mean by that is if I am here and I am completely open to music in general, I have access to everything. I have access to Mozart, Bach, Paganini, John Cage, Pygmy music from Africa, Jazz, rock, orchestra, Balenese music, Javanese music, modern rock, ancient Rock, Elvis Presley and the Beatles; I really have access to everything and even to a marriage musician in Syria, for example, that Sublime Frequencies6 went, found and broadcasted all over the globe, or this Uzbek noise guy that Cedrik Fermont7 found and broadcasted. You know, all of these are present. And if you forget the politics and strategies, they are all on the same level for me. I can play this one; I can play that one I can play them all. They are all presented to me now simultaneously. So, how does this affect me? It affects me, of

6  Sublime Frequencies is a record label based in Seattle, Washington that focuses exclusively on sounds and music practices in Southeast Asia, North Africa and West Africa and the Middle East. 7  Read the conversation with Cedrik Fermont later in this book.

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course, by creating a completely blurred boundary identity in music. Because this for me is the new identity in music, and this can, of course, include sound. Finally, at the end, it is sound and you can of course hear the sounds, you have Sound Banks and you can get any sample of sound that you are thinking about. You have people doing database of field recordings, so now I can listen to a market in Calcutta, or a harbour in Detroit, so it is all there. BC: But there is a question of structural or political colonialism of music, of hierarchies, of power structures and the way the strategies are inclined towards promoting a certain kind of package—a certain kind of corpus of works with intersecting tendencies. For example, ‘sound art’ is a package, and these kind of packages are inclined towards Eurocentrism but seeking a global market. And when we withdraw from our personal affects and look at this whole picture as sonic thinkers, don’t you think that these hierarchies and power relations, packaging and promotions have some kind of Eurocentric inclinations in this whole process, as well as patronisation? Isn’t this something that we need to address? Power relations are problematic. SS: Yes, I think so. I try to address it whenever I can but again this is when I am thinking politics. If I don’t think politics and I think only of music and sound, I think the present time is great. I really like this time. But it is also breeding Eurocentrism, post-/new-­ colonial attitudes, the world dominance of Americans and Europeans on music, which is in some parts justified by the impressive infrastructure, by means, by networks and also by the way they give space to arts in society. And I am not just going to criticise them; I am also criticising the rest of the world for not giving such a space as well for art and creation in general in the society. But it is problematic when those structures reproduce their own self. For instance, you have festivals, which year after year have combinations of Norwegian, Italian, American and Polish music, and the next year, it is some French and so on. And year after year, this goes on. Maybe you have sometimes a project from outside that specific geographical area, but only in some cases. Sometimes I look at the programmes of these music festivals with a lot of curiosity to see when this will change but it does not necessarily change. So this I find it a bit problematic because there are very interesting artists in the rest of the world as well. And somehow it is true that you have

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a better infrastructure, more money, etc., but these should not only be used to breed yourself but also to expand. And then once you get into the idea of expansion you get into the other problems, which is this post-colonial problem that we were talking about. So they want you to be exotic. For me, there is an additional layer to this problem, which is even worse. They want you to be sensational, which is more problematic than exoticising. Exotic for me is like: you are Indian so you have to play Indian traditional music, otherwise we have people here playing what we play so why are you interesting to us? Which is ridiculous! They will deny this but it is in the back of their mind. I have had programmers, who have told me this—I will not name them. The sensationalism is even worse; it is like necrophilia to me. Syria is being bombed now so we want Syrian artists. It is sensational. They have witnessed death and bombing and we want them to come here and play. And the Europeans and Americans would be really excited to have Syrian musicians and immediately you can predict the labelling—‘Fighting War with Music’, for instance. Of course, you cannot help thinking that if you had booked this artist before they were bombed, it might have helped them rather than booking them when it is actually too late. This annoys me very much. So these are the two main problems I see in European or Western ethnocentrism. Again this is not music but it is about politics, strategies, PR and management, all these big industry issues. BC: Also canonisation. Experimental music and sound art are European canons and often the non-Western or Global South artists, who are working, experimenting with sound and producing innovative works are kept outside the canon, on the margin, because of their cultural backgrounds. SS: Yes, because they do not fit into the strategy of breeding their own self. And I am pretty sure that most people are doing this unconsciously. I think most of the people are reproducing the system and are not conscious that they are reproducing, and believe that they are doing the right thing. BC: Another very important point is (if we take away politics and strategy as you said), still a question of structure. Music or sound practice from a broader perspective is something to do with time, with temporality. But the European modernity came with the tool of recording—like durational recording, shellac discs, 2 minutes 30 seconds, then 33.3 Long Play, 45 minutes and then tape. So record-

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ing as a technology disturbed the transcendental aspect of sound practices of most non-Western pre-modern traditions, where duration was kept open. Tarab8 was performed for hours and hours, some other non-Western sonic practices, such as Dhrupad, were performed for five or six hours. This structural disturbance was brought in by the Western modernity through colonisation. Most of the early recordings we find are kind of awkward because they are trying to cut the possibility of sound into small durational clips. SS: I think it is not only about recording but also about how the society has evolved with time. Everybody is always in a rush and has so much to do that they don’t have time for anything else. Even when you do not have recordings and have musicians in Europe playing five-hour concerts, people will come for half an hour and then go to the movies, and then they will go to their friends. I think what we lost—generally speaking, and not only in the West—is the luxury of time. I am sure some people must still have it in some remote areas; if you live in Northern Siberia, for instance, I’m pretty sure you have time; or maybe not, I don’t know. But it is a general loss of luxury of time. So today at a festival, typically there are 30 to 40 minutes slots. BC: Is it not something that you find problematic from the de-colonial perspective? SS: Yes, I find it very problematic. This is actually a part of the post-­ modern world. In a way, it’s too late. This problem has already happened; now we are already in post-modern era and how do you deal with it? How do you create space for yourself? I’m not going to speak as a musician but as an audience. How do I create a space for myself to go and listen to 20 hours of music? It is up to the individual to create that space, not only as an artist but generally as someone who likes art or music. And this is disappearing. I am sure there were more people even 20 years ago, who would have liked to go and listen to music for 20 hours. And when I say this, I really mean music and not these silly festivals where you are jumping from one beer stand to another, one hotdog stand to another and from stage to stage. Some festivals to which I go now are festivals with nonstop music—from 11 a.m. to 5 a.m. Non-stop music, 8  The term Tarab is used in Arabic sonic culture to describe the emotional effect of music. It is also associated with a traditional form of art-music in which ecstasy and trance have a significant relevance.

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bands and venues. I don’t know if it has always been like this for festivals, but now you really start the concert with approximately 200 people, and after 5 minutes there are 150 people, and again 5 minutes later there are 250 people. It constantly keeps changing. One guy is listening in front of you and he goes away and then someone else comes. So people jumping or zapping live music, which drives me crazy. Because music is about listening and I don’t know how they can do this. I am talking as an audience here. I do not care if I am playing at such a festival because I do not care if my audience comes and goes. You play in a show and then you are in the festival for a few days so you also keep jumping from one show to another. For me, it was actually the opposite of what music should be. BC: And then there is a question of appropriation. I will give you two examples, which you may connect with. First: the emergence of sound art in the 60s and 70s has strong connection with the American minimalist school consisting of among others La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Marian Zazeela and a little earlier, John Cage.9 This American minimalist school was instrumental in creating a sense of exposure to non-Western traditions in terms of the nondurational aspect of sounds, minimal texture in musical practices and also the chance aspects. La Monte Young learnt from Indian musicians; John Cage learnt from Indian as well as Chinese music and i-Ching, but produced music that quickly became part of the Western canon. This appropriation happened but not many citations or references were made—like borrowing from a particular tradition without giving credit to that sonic tradition. And everything was eaten up in the Western canon without giving necessary citation and references. Don’t you find that problematic in the music and sound history? SS: That’s exactly what we have been talking about for the last hour. It is also part of the politics and it does not surprise me. My good friend Khyam Allami10 was showing me (I think we were discussing it together, the three of us!) how it is said in the West about who John Cage was influenced by: Africa. As if Africa is a composer. Who in Africa? Africa has 70 countries, which country then and 9  See: Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (forthcoming). Sonic Perspectives from the Global South: Connecting Resonances. New York: Bloomsbury Academic (forthcoming). 10  Read the conversation with Khyam Allami later in the book.

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which specific culture? It is just Africa. This is almost borderline racist. What can we do? But I would not put the entire blame on Europe or America. In the Middle Eastern countries we have not taken care of our own history well enough either. We have not given music that adequate place it should have in society. We don’t give it any importance at the state level or at an institutional level. So the blame is everywhere. A single person is not to be blamed in my opinion. But I would like to hope that the things will change. BC: As an artist or as a musician, do you like to respond to these hierarchies and historical injustices, or shift the perspective of the history of hierarchy and hegemony in music and sound? SS: What I try to do as a Lebanese musician and also an organiser is to focus on my own country and try to improve things with the very limited means I have. Actually I am very focused on that rather than trying to change anything in Europe. My job is not to change anything in Europe but to change the things here. So that is more or less what I have been doing for 20 years with the Irtijal Festival or other festivals and events that I have organised. I think this is the most useful thing that I could be doing; to counter, to get a better organisation here and give more freedom to Lebanese and Arab artists. Also more circulation between different Arab countries, creating bridges and exchanging influences. This is much more needed for us here rather than attacking Europe. On another level, I am really thankful to Europe, and that is not contradictory to me: to be thankful but also being critical. BC: Personally as a researcher, practitioner, artist, I am indebted to Europe but I cannot deny that there is a question of hierarchy, centralisation, political selection and so on. We cannot deny that. SS: Yes. I am saying it is not contradictory, but these things go hand in hand. In the end, for the rest of the world to be like Europe at an institutional level and to have the same means, there is still a long way to go. What we want is an exchange and not to destroy anything. Maybe improvement is a better word. BC: Reciprocity. Equal respect for each other and mutual exchanges; and exchanges were there historically, we can trace back to so many intersections and historical encounters. SS: I mean historically, not only in music. Forget about Europe or the USA. For that matter in any country, historically any art form has always benefitted from opening up to neighbouring countries and

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to the rest of the world. It is a beneficial thing generally speaking. And opening up—let’s say like John Cage did—is not a colonial, strategic opening up. It is a personal, internal experience that John Cage had with alien forms of music which were strange to him, but he managed to relate to those and these had a profound impact on him. So this is a typical structure where you are constantly benefitting from discovering something new by broadening your cultural perspective. And this is true not only for music but also for any art form and even for thoughts. But European ethnocentrism upsets me. What pisses me off is the sensationalism. Sensationalism drives me crazy. For me, it’s really like vultures preying on corpses—there are dead people so we come for the artist. I hate this, although the artists themselves benefit from this sometimes. And they should benefit from this—that’s not the question. BC: I have experienced this personally in all these 13 years in Europe, and I wrote about it. It is like a cultural and national identification. I am forced into margin through this identification, which is a political game not to include me in the canon of sound art and experimental music which is meant for a certain privileged class in Europe, for not only consumption but also producing. I am not allowed to produce something original because I am perceived as someone coming from the outside, or from a particular ethnic background. SS: So, you are seen like a copyist, instead of an originator. BC: Through this research, I am trying to understand the traces, as I am forced into marginalisation like many other artists coming from the non-west. What is common to us is this marginalisation—the cause or root of this marginalisation is the traces that we carry. So locating and understanding these traces is important not only to push myself as a recognised artist and thinker with dignity, something to do with finding and reclaiming a just position in history, and at the same time arrive at a broader, planetary sense of reciprocity. Once we know about and determine our due positions, we can demand reciprocity, which means taking equal part in this sonic discourse, in this conversation. SS: Our job is more difficult than others’. But there are still people who you can reciprocate with.

CHAPTER 6

Ximena Alarcón Díaz

I met Ximena Alarcón on many occasions, notably at the Sonologia conferences in São Paulo (2016, 2019),1 the Media Art History conference at Aalborg (2019)2 and at other scholarly and artistic gatherings. We were co-­ editors of Sonic Field—a journal and web resource on sonic culture.3 This conversation was held via Zoom in 2020. As I had to access Zoom via a phone, we spoke through an audio-only connection. BC: I would like to start with your background. Where were you born, and how did you come to work with sound? XA: I was born in Bogotá, Colombia. For me, working with sound has been a lot of listening originally in a very big family house with lots of sounds from little and big animals, along with a diversity of music. I am embedded in and surrounded by a big kind of sonic space I will say, and I always liked music. I was always interested in singing when I was a teenager. I learned how to play the guitar— Spanish folk guitar—and then I was always doing activities related to music, usually Vocal Ensembles, and guitar and folk and more Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Ximena Alarcón Díaz—XA.  See: http://www2.eca.usp.br/sonologia/2019/  See: http://www.mediaarthistory.org/resound 3  See: http://sonicfield.org 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_6

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choirs. So I went through all the styles within the Latin American environment and whatever I heard or liked, I just tried to play it by ear. So I studied music formally, but not really. It was just to know the notation of the guitar but really I never liked notation; I followed the notation but I couldn’t say I read it. Actually, my family thought I was going to study music, but I didn’t. I studied another thing. In my first degree, I studied social communication. I was actually interested in recording stuff and that’s when that came. So I just did that training, that degree that has lots of radio, audiovisual, television and art, aesthetic, theatre and we learned kind of a mix of things. In this mix of things, it was mostly done in group work and I was the sound person; they used to say to me, ‘Oh, you have a good ear’. I was that person although I worked with image, photography, video and all of that, I loved it and I was also good at that, but I focused a lot on sound, just mixing things. My big family has had a different taste for music and I just mixed different pieces of vinyl to help with the audiovisual work (in my University’s assignments) with the radio project. So that was my experience with sound. Then I focused a bit more on that after I finished the University. I started to work in television professionally—in video— and I used to like that a lot but I wanted to work with communities in my country. So I ended up working in community radio and I was not much of a fan of the format, so community media helps you to break the format. I just enjoyed working with social leaders, with students from villages in Colombia and community radio and all that it involves. But that helped me within the context to experiment quite a lot. So what I was doing with a basic tape recorder was facilitating and making radio programmes with communities, students, social leaders, and we were making effects with whatever we had in their spaces, for instance, in the school classroom (like chairs etc.). Then we used to go to the professional radio station and include these recordings from the community. I also created workshops on how to create a radio programme with them. Eventually, I wanted to study something else. I continued working in professional television and radio, but eventually I left the country to do my Master’s in Communication and education in Barcelona, but that was not very interesting for me. I was very bored. It was again formalising what I wanted. What they were teaching was really from the 70s. It was in the late 90s, and I was getting a formal mas-

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ter’s from the 70s. And this is when I said, ‘Well, I am in a wonderful place and so I have to see what is here in Barcelona.’ That’s when I suddenly went to a contemporary centre for art called Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona,4 and I saw a leaflet for a summer course which was with community television artists from the USA and video interactive artists from Barcelona—they were very important collectives, particularly the artist Tony Serra. It was the Quinzena D’Art de Montesquiu, spending 15 days in a castle in a village in Barcelona and I thought that that sounded like it could fit me. So I went there and I was the only one who was not an artist—I mean not formally an artist. But I realised that what I wanted to communicate before in the master’s made me feel like a very strange person; in this new context, I was understood, they understood what I wanted to say. I felt a lot of flexibility and then it was the technology, interactive art and then again sound. So, for example, we worked with Quicktime but all of a sudden, I was doing something that was more sonic than the usual mixing, and the artists said to me that ‘Well, you should look for sound things because it seems like you are interested in sound.’ So that was it. I was in that workshop and then I continued with the same organisation that offered workshops for artists. They wanted to decentralise the culture in Barcelona by offering activities in the regions and this is how I started to be a part of that. I did another workshop where the topic was about the internet and short formats. Of course, it was very new, so we started to experiment with the internet from an artistic perspective. And the last workshop I did was a workshop where there was a mix of letters to pronounce that didn’t make any linguistic sense but were sounds and they offered sound resources for musicians and non-musicians. This is when I discovered sound art for the first time. It was with the Orchestra del Chaos, Clara Gari, Josep Manuel Berenguer, Carlos Gomez, Oscar Abril Ascaso, and they actually invited Christina Kubisch5 and Hans Peter Kuhn. So with Christina Kubisch at the time, I had the chance to make my first installation ever and to know what a sound installation was. I learned about soundscapes, they mentioned different artists, a mix  CCCB: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, website: https://www.cccb.org  Christina Kubisch is a composer, sound and performance artist; she composes both electronic and acoustic music for multimedia installations and performance. 4 5

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of things and technologies. For the first time, I heard about Pro Tools and about Max/MSP; that was around about 1998 when I left Barcelona to go back to my country to pay the educational debt that I had. I was still looking for sound art activities but in Colombia, I had to do other strategies because there I was not originally an artist, so I was trying to find artists to say that this is what I have learned and to try to keep my creative being with sound. The only way to do this was by working in multimedia and also I could earn my living from that. So I started doing institutional CD ROMs. In the making, I placed a lot of attention on sound and I had the budget to hire a special microphone to go and record interesting things. That’s when I started to experiment with microphones; until then I recorded everything with tape recorders. That was it, but I felt like I couldn’t really fulfil what I wanted because the whole idea of working and producing lots of products that focus on image was super difficult and so I left my country again and I came here to England, just to find out about my life again. I was doing babysitting jobs but I wanted to find that thing that I found in Barcelona, which I knew was called sound art, but here I couldn’t find it. I found instead something called electroacoustic music in a summer school in Leeds. So I did electroacoustic music and electro-acoustic voice (that was a summer workshop again), kind of reviving the one in Barcelona but a bit differently because those people were more musicians while the ones in Barcelona were more artists. For me, this was the same. I am the same person, but I knew that the approaches were different and so I started to find out where to study this. I knew it was a fantasy because of the amount of money that studying any degree implies in England, but I was asking. While doing that, I discovered a PhD student who was researching real-world sounds, and then I remembered what I did with Christina Kubisch; that was real sounds. It was an installation with sounds that I made with the sound of the Latin alphabet characters written with chalk on the blackboard—memories of literacy, and I started playing with the letters. I sent that piece to the student and he was interested. That was the part where I said, ‘Okay, here they call it real world sound. Okay let’s go for that’. I started really just playing the game of what do they call what I do? And who studies that? What else can I do with that? With that search, I knew about a sound art master’s in Middlesex University for which I applied but never received any reply. So I contacted this PhD student from

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Leicester, and he said, ‘Well, you can come here and talk to my advisor, what we do here is called music technology and innovation’. So I said okay and went and they asked me for a portfolio and I put together all my things—multimedia and everything, my ideas. I went and they asked, ‘What do you want to do?’ and I said, ‘Well, a master’s no?’ They said, ‘We think you will waste your time. We do not have a master’s degree and if we had one, you would still waste your time because I think what you want to do is a PhD’. I never imagined in my life that I would be doing a PhD. I mean I had a struggle with academia in Barcelona with this kind of master’s (academic programmes) which framed me and I didn’t want any more frames, but also at the time I didn’t want to study more English courses in England. They were maintaining my visa here, and so I said that the next step is either to do a PhD as they said, or to enrol in another English course for business or something like that. So again, it was a fantasy really; I thought if they accept me, it’s for something. It took me nine months to write a PhD proposal and to understand it, or contextualise it, and to say, ‘Oh, this is why I had to study soundscapes because I wanted to do the metro project that I’ve been working on for a long time, et cetera’. Finally, my English was really basic, so it was a big challenge on that level to do a PhD in English. But eventually after a lot of things, I ended up there in Leicester, I enrolled in a PhD programme and I tried to do it and I did it with lots of effort—lots of financial effort, because it is difficult without having any fellowship. So anyway, that was my pathway. I entered the world of ‘soundscapes’, distinguishing environmental soundscapes from ‘soundscape composition’—that was how it was defined, but in my environment, they were all composers so it was very different. I also felt that I was talking about social issues that were not really easily understood by them. Anyway, I finished my PhD and then I went my way and I’ve always been a transdisciplinary person. I had the Leverhulme Trust fellowship because of which they understood me a bit more. So I was in creative technologies and then I ended up in sound art. That kind of helped me to consolidate something under the umbrella of sound art. Since I was there, I told myself that I won’t call myself any other thing but this, because before I was known as a media artist. So that’s my path but, as you know, it’s what I call sonic migrations. I recently said in a podcast in Brazil, with Sonora by the way, that if I had not migrated, I wouldn’t have been an artist and that sound

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has provided me the means to find my interface between sound and technologies. Just looking and looking for ways of listening to make sense of where I am in the world and, of course, art helps me to put these things together in a material way, to understand them. BC: Going back to your growing up, you said that the structural element and framing of music didn’t attract you. Was it the predominantly western tradition of music notation that didn’t attract you? XA: Yes, because I love sound, listening and I love repetition and probably now I could say that I still have a very good memory to learn anything that is playing. I was the one who was continuously repeating a song and I would go on repeating. So I love music but the Western notation was another language first of all, and so to find that something on paper dictates how I have to sound was, for me, a bit repressive and narrowing. I didn’t know that then but now I can say it—I find it very stiff. If someone, let’s say in Bogota. is interested in music and doesn’t necessarily have money to pay a music teacher—which was my case—usually what families do is go to the public university that has a conservatory with their children to see if the children want to study. I was already 13 when I started to learn the guitar, so I was a bit older and one of my brothers took me to the National University because he likes music a lot too. He said, ‘Would you like to be in the conservatoire?’ I remember going and it was a really beautiful campus: it’s like a city and there are cows and horses and you can see the rooms where students of music are studying. I saw them sitting alone in front of a piano or a violin—the typical instruments—with a score. For me, music was a lot of socialising—we find that in Latin America culture. In a house, there is always a guitar, friends come and there is a lot of music, you sing and everyone knows songs from different parts of the country and then you are dancing. So for me, music was a lot about socialising or saying a message because I also grew up in the time of the Nueva Canción and Nueva Trova,6 maybe you have heard of that. My siblings were older than me and they had all the collections of this protest music from Cuba and from Argentina, and that was really good music that mixed all sorts of things and influences. The classical part is what this possible university where I could have  Nueva Canción and Nueva Trova are movements in Cuban music that emerged around 1967/1968 after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and the consequent political and social changes having significant impact on Latin American sound culture. 6

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studied music was offering me and I found it very strict, this environment of music/of learning music, so I actually found it better to get into recording and mixing. It was more liberating. BC: Was it also related to the community? You mentioned the Latin American culture—can you find some elements of community building, socialising, aspects of nature or indigenous culture, which are in Latin America that are more close to nature, natural practices, natural temporal practices and temporality? XA: Yes, it is another thing—the instruments. I mean the second part of my degree in university, I was in a choir with a group that was called ‘Voices and Strings’—it was a folk group. They ended, the director left, but the director was kind of part of a famous folk band. I learned a lot; there were also lots of folk instruments. The wind instruments in Colombia—the flutes—they have to do more with the indigenous part of culture, so we have the indigenous that have all the wind instruments and then we have the guitars and all sorts of string instruments that were more Spanish. Then we had all the drums that were African. So when you go and try to put that in a classical frame, it doesn’t make sense. Although in the choir, there were only voices. That was nice and we had a repertoire and we had indigenous music for vocals, which was really interesting, and we had Brazilian music but we ended up singing opera; so we sang Don Giovanni as part of the new opera of Colombia. So it was a mix, Latin America is that too. It’s kind of, like ‘okay, how does this sound?’ Within that mix, we were all amateurs because in my university, there were no arts so the people who were with me as part of the choir were studying law, economics, et cetera and I was studying communication. The only real musician and opera singer actually was the director of the choir. So it was a really interesting thing. We were not required to read the score—although he gave us a score and we followed the score, but we were, most of us, learning by ear. When we went into the opera part, there was more classical stuff to be sung in that sphere. I encountered professional musicians again, and I found it very rigid. I tried to be part of the choir because I love it; I love to sing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. You start to meet all these worlds of divas in music, the sopranos, and I knew my voice was good but not necessarily professional so I was in the back. I knew I was not one of them, but I enjoyed being there. I never imagined composing, for example, or doing things.

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Now I clearly see with all the historical contexts: Pauline Oliveros7 and Musique Concrète—with that you are eventually composing and making music. But to tell people who were in the choir with me 20 years ago that what I am doing now is called music, is a no-no; or even to tell other people—I don’t call it music anyway. This social and community aspect of music and sound, and the learning by the ear stayed with you all through, right? Yes, community and learning by the ear. Yes, I think you have placed it perfectly really and that’s a very nice reflection. Did you face problems with this approach, when you moved to Europe, for example, in the UK, when you started to establish yourself? In Europe, precisely in Barcelona, when I encountered sound art, it was perfect. Also, when I encountered community art, there were radical video artists and radical interactive artists on the television; so in the art world, it was perfect. Here, in the music, technology and innovation world, I struggled. I encountered it again—of course, with others, they didn’t necessarily have the instruments, but the instruments now were the technology and the virtuoso began appearing again—I mean certain characters were coming in. So the character of the virtuoso was no longer one of the piano or violin or only voice, but the virtuoso was the one who could make electroacoustic music. I never imagined it; it never occurred to me, but now it was super clear that it was a ‘white, male composer’ environment, and some things I want to say now about how I was able to stand it: I knew I was suffering, it was really hard to do my PhD. Super hard. The vocabulary was a mix, I didn’t know if it was my English language. The other part was also what I’m talking about—I’m talking about art or I’m not an artist. So they said: ‘Is that the way that you talk to artists like us?’ and so I realised that, okay I am not (a part of this). The idea was of being interdisciplinary, the idea was to include something that is precisely community or helping me; I was talking about collective memory—that was my PhD. I had a second supervisor who helped me a lot and he was

7  Pauline Oliveros was a pioneering composer and accordionist. Since the 1960s, her work has been concerned with improvisation, meditation, and ritual. She was the founder of Deep Listening that comes from her association with Buddhist Philosophy and Listening approaches.

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coming from psychology and actually he was also an artist. He helped me a lot to understand the environment that I was in as a PhD student—the environment that was not necessarily as open to understanding where I was coming from or they were a bit afraid. Basically, they were making the distinction that I was not like them. I already have felt that in Colombia when trying to sing in Operas or any other thing, when they said: ‘She’s here but I don’t know why she is here.’ I am not like them. So these encounters were a struggle but I managed because fortunately, there were also other voices, encouraging voices. Also, I did my thing alone with lots of resilience I think, lots of resilience. And I did find supportive voices, but that’s only when I finished my PhD. It was around 2006 that I finished the writing. Yes I submitted in 2006, and it was only at that time that the first books in sound art started to appear; only at that time. Before, I was speaking in gibberish—in completely another thing—and I couldn’t have anyone to talk to. Everything was about fighting and fighting and trying to become kind of like what they were doing but it’s not what I was doing. So yeah, it was hard. BC: Did this connection with learning through the ear bring you to Pauline Oliveros’s practice of deep listening? XA: That’s a very nice question. Yes, when I first met Pauline, I think my first encounters with her were more in workshops about listening only. The first time she came to De Montfort, it was listening and meditation; we were not sounding anything at that time. But my PhD was already about the ear, it was about what you remember (what people remembered from what they have heard in the London Underground), that was my research question. What is left in the memories of commuters, after commuting, in their routine lives? What is left? So it was about memories and remembering too but there were other ideas of remembering, so this idea of listening by ear. Then I met Pauline and she talked about inner listening. In my PhD, the input that I received a lot was from the soundscape school from Canada and that school was a lot about the outer, a lot about the analysis of acoustic effects almost or events. I knew that I was missing something—the information that I received from the interviews and from my work (my creative work). All those people who were engaged in my work were telling me other things that this acoustic ecology approach was not giving me. I was talking about feelings and emotions and they were telling me what they felt

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when they heard the train coming and all of these things. Not about the dB or Hi-fi/Lo-fi. So when I met Pauline, I started to balance all these things; things that no one has heard or that I couldn’t find a way to express, I started to find with Pauline. I was already in the postdoc when I met Pauline, so I had already done lots of things. But she started to question some things that I shared with her about my PhD.  About non-judgemental listening, for example, that was a key for me. I knew it was judgemental about the Hi-fi and Lo-fi of sounds; this almost medical classification of sounds, it was not what I was talking about but it was the only reference. There were other definitions of listening: Katharine Norman had interesting things that I found before Pauline, a bit closer, but then Pauline came with a practice and then in the retreats, I started doing improvisation. That somehow is what I was looking for in Barcelona. That was it—improvisation. It was wonderful because I stopped choir and any ensemble after learning about Sound Art. But I missed it, I missed playing with others and that was the way to play with others. It was about playing by ear, but it was not necessarily about memorising, as probably before the choir training. It was about just being and responding to others, and listening to others and how you are sounding. Yeah, learning about improvisation was a different thing but yes, it helped me find my interest from my childhood. BC: Yes, it refers to a listening approach of sociality, community and connecting with others through sound. Also, I was wondering about the source of your work with migration—is it coming from your own migratory experiences? I refer to the way migration instilled in you a search for memory, maybe? XA: Yes, definitely. Since I realised that what I was doing was called art, that was my first art work: this interactive metro in Barcelona. It was part of my migration because it was the big revelation of being in a machine that transported me. In Colombia, only one city has a metro and it is not my city and we have lots of problems with mobility. Since being in my city, I was interested more in mobility and also mobility has all these issues that now the field is called mobilities studies, which is new too. It’s a bit like Bangalore: so the amount of time that it takes in Bogota to commute from where I was living to my university was one hour and a half at least and I had to get at least three buses to get there and these buses were in

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different conditions, half broken, but less broken. All of these things that are happening plus the body violence that is involved in being in public transport, in many aspects. So it is about the machine itself and it’s about the others touching each other because they were crowded buses, and also the social differences across the city because Bogotá is an extremely class divided city. When you are in the bus, you can see all of this. So because I was coming from communication or let’s say film, I was looking at everything in a more cinematic way and imagining in a cinematic way. But then when I was in Barcelona, I met this metro and I was like ‘wow, this really changes the way that you walk, that you feel’, and then I started to listen. Well it happens in Bogotá too but Bogotá is very loud. Between motors and radio (each bus has a radio—that kind of the sonic band that you will know and sometimes it is quite irritating to hear). Now I think it is quite interesting but before, when living there, it was kind of hard. So yeah, then I went into a capsule where I had more focus on the sonic idea. It’s part of that but also part of the ritual of going inside: the transition, the transition of commuting as part of the migration. So definitely it was there, the idea of migration but I didn’t know it and I was putting different names into that. BC: Did you find in Pauline Oliveros’ practice of deep listening something emancipatory or something you could relate to immediately? Or is it because of the non-European approach that she had drawn from, for example, from Buddhist philosophy? XA: Yes, definitely. Pauline Oliveros is one thing herself but she is also a full practice in herself, no? So I think that any conversation with her was an invitation to emancipate in one way or another, no? Simple questions. Definitely. First, to have all these ideas that were coming from a woman was important. In the time when I met Pauline, I had a very—I mean 100%—male-dominated environment. In the beginning, I cannot say that I understood her, well no, I mean she held the workshops and I said: ‘Yeah, I did my full PhD about listening. I was thinking, no?’ And then she was talking about listeners but I didn’t immediately connect because I was still in the analytical and she was not necessarily in the analytical; she just said listen and sense. So that was a big emancipation particularly if you have just finished a PhD in listening and you have had lots of references. So also it was about my own listening: I was asking others

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how they listen and I listened to them, of course, but then when it came to me, when I was the person to research in myself, it was different. So it’s about dropping the analytical and the rational and the full explanatory way of approaching listening experiences. That was Pauline Oliveros for me. And then there was the practice of deep listening of course. I started to get more and more involved, started to discover more and more things and still I continue discovering. BC: This intention to have embodied performances in your ‘INTIMAL’ project also draws from your migratory experience. Does it have something to do with going back to the cultural roots and the community, working with the women from other diasporic communities of the Global South? XA: Yes, it is interesting to link it to my childhood. I haven’t linked it in this way of community, but I think you have made a very good point there. Originally, I saw the whole thing as an interface. I first feel that with all my work with trains, I spent seven years talking more or less about the same thing; that was a lot of time, and it was about trains. So the train is the interface and then when I remove this to talk about migration, I remove the trains and then I remain with the computer. This is now my machine, the interface. There are two ways and the two are probably related. The fact that I am really tired of sitting in front of a machine, and the lack of mobility applies to sitting in the train for long hours. Now we are also sitting in this Zoom train for long hours. So there is an issue of mobility. It has been a question since I left Colombia. With the buses, it was about mobility; I never wanted a car even though the city had a very car culture base. I think I’ve been questioning the idea of mobility and eventually I arrived at the body, and I think there is something related to childhood too. In the performance of ‘INTIMAL’ that finally happened on 7th May 2019 in London, in a moment of interaction, these three women behave like they are in a playground and they spontaneously sing a children’s rhyme that we played and move. Because also what I wanted is that they unplug; so they are with the mobiles, listening. That’s interesting because I arrived to music also because I was not necessarily into sports. I think there is an original certain fear of the body being injured and I was not necessarily a very adventurous child in the games, to roll or to do things because I didn’t know if I was going to fall or when I was very adventurous I broke a leg or things like

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that. There is something about mobility that goes farther than the machines and eventually I had to go through this journey to find my interface and to realise that the interface is the body. So it is a mix between deep listening where Pauline Oliveros reminds us to listen with the full body, and in the work that I’m working on, the first thing that I go to is the machine, to the metro—an infrastructure which is so powerful or most violent. I found a lot of poetry there. I was very emotional with these machines, the metro and trains. So yes, it is very interesting how I moved and recently I was talking about the post-industrial times: I was very much in the Industrial Revolution despite coming from an agriculture-based country and I was removing these machines more and more to see what was left. I think it is a combination of both. Migration and these machines and, of course, deep listening is incredible and Pauline, of course, she was really into the embodiment of technology, no? BC: And also presence—the idea of presence. XA: Yes. How do you make your presence or how do you feel your own presence? BC: Do you think that this sense of presence is far more experienced in non-European traditions? For example, in Latin America where community, body, presence are mostly interlinked in comparison with the European ways of life in which it’s more about the lack of actual presence and more about presence constructed through technological mediations? XA: Yes, definitely. I think the big trauma—social trauma—is the Industrial Revolution. They cut lots of things in their body, even in their music, and you see it. In England, you can see it very clearly. If you go to France, it’s a bit different. I think the relationship with the tools and the relationship of the land to work is the land that is used for cultivation and here there was destruction and construction, whereas we have cultivation and those kinds of tools. Of course, now we are fully industrialised too, more and more—I mean the destruction part. But definitely just with the work on the metros where I worked by comparing London, Paris and Mexico, it was so clear how in Mexico, it was the full body in the machine. I mean they were actually hacking the machine with their bodies. When you listen to my work in Mexico’s metro, you hear mostly humans: human contact, human sounds, human screaming, et

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cetera. In Paris, it’s kind of a mix but there’s a lot of silence in modernity like what Emily Thompson suggests in ‘The Soundscape of Modernity’.8 And in England, it is the most violent and the most diverse though because of the amount of materials and people too but it’s also the most controlled. Yeah, it is the most violent, and just to have one of the deepest underground metro that goes 20 metres under the earth is strong. There is the appropriation of these machines in different parts of the world. That was what I was questioning at the time. It is very interesting and definitely I think there is the idea of body, community and presence. There are many factors; I think also an equal development because here, for example, in this country, people still trust the state. In Latin America, either you choose a religion, you choose the saint because you prefer to pray or because it’s the only one that in your mind will help you, or your closest community which is your family or your group of friends, and you go with this. Well, here you see that these structures, are the families, are not necessarily what they need to be until the end. There are lots of issues with families here. I mean we have lots of issues too, but the effort to keep the community is very strong because you know it is the only thing that could save you because you cannot trust anything. So it is a mix of many things. BC: Are you working on any project in the coming years? XA: Yes. Well, at the moment, I’ll continue with ‘INTIMAL’. It was just two years of postdoc and it was a lot and it was new to me; a lot to digest. So now I will continue with the idea that I have called and I will continue calling it while I try to understand interfaces for relational listening. I continue working with that and I now have the ‘INTIMAL’ collective which is my community that grew out of the project. This community basically is kind of a deep listening group but we are listening to our migrations. There are so many issues that are now happening. We are in planning because from all of them there are some that want to continue and others that want to come to the meetings but not necessarily co-create, there are others that want to co-create and to share this experience with oth8  Thompson, Emily (2004). The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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ers and we are finding ways to do it. Now I have already created the INTIMAL app; it is a phone app where I am trying to put together all that I did with this sophisticated technology that I don’t have anymore or that I have parts that don’t work or that don’t work anymore with the context. I want to put the ideas and the concepts and a bit of the functionalities that I have into an app that is accessible. I am interested now in accessible technologies because although it was very nice to experiment with breathing sensors, once you go to the real world and out of the universities, you know that that’s not for everyone. I want to have accessible technologies for everyone, including myself as an artist. For example, I’m now working with sonification in a super simple way and that’s new for me because it’s the first time that I have worked with electronic sounds. I continue working with the spoken word; if the sound environment comes, of course, it comes, but now I am working with spoken word and sonification, rhythms, so I’m working with walking and breathing. It’s the same idea: walking to sense a place and breathing to feel presence across distant locations. I am working with Tele-presence, a presence that is not only Tele—but also co-presence. The same things that I did during these two years at an incredible speed and with lots of people supporting that, now I am doing it alone but I am building it with people from the collective in different areas. So I continue with this INTIMAL app, which I am now developing as a service and not as a product. I am working in collaboration with a designer/design thinking person from the INTIMAL collective who is helping me to do these user experiences and just to arrive more to the real world. I’m experiencing the real world that is outside universities. It has been painful but it has also been so rewarding; I am now in the rewarding part. BC: Okay. One question I wanted to ask you is, did your work directly engage with the idea of colonisation and decoloniality? There is a strong history of colonisation in Latin America through its fraught relationship with Europe. Was that reflected in your work directly or indirectly? XA: I think indirectly it is there. I have never taken it as a discourse as you probably saw because you were in Brazil with Susan Campos Fonseca who’s very direct about it. That was actually the first time—not the first time actually, but it shook me a bit just to ask myself. I am avoiding to addressing what I do with these concepts

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of post-colonisation and feminism too. I know they are there, but I want them to emerge naturally and because I know, since I am here, that it’s kind of an individual thing even just to say that I’m going to do a PhD about the London Underground which is the most English thing ever, because well, if I’m from Colombia, why don’t I do a PhD about Colombia? So I have an inner silent struggle. I’ve been fighting this in different ways: who are the participants in my research, how many people I include. I have been kind of dealing with these little struggles that are not necessarily so overt but in the inclusion or rejection of certain things that I work with. I’m now actually working on a project and I’m writing a book too; I’m trying to write my book. I would love tips about that because you have experience. It collects all these experiences; I am collecting experiences from the trains till now because it’s all part of the same thing. Probably in that, writing is where I need to start to have these discourses clearly and also to catch up on Latin American discourses because I’ve been out. For example, relatively recently (one year ago), I knew Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,9 who is one of the authors who is very important for these discourses and it’s a discourse that is actually coming from Latin America—not from the US nor from here [Europe]—and talking about us? Now there are new things coming. One thing that I read during my degree was Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier with the Auralities book, which is so important just for the Colombian case.10 It’s super important. And this has come but because INTIMAL has been kind of very busy because of the many things that happened. Also some of the participants in this discourse are activists, participants in the research. I also have been careful that their discourse is not necessarily my discourse, and that I have clarity of how I do things. I mean we are in the same boat but in terms of discourse, I think in this moment, it’s more indirect. BC: What about identification/the way you like to identify yourself. Is it as a Colombian artist living in the UK? Or as a British artist, or 9  Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a Bolivian feminist scholar, sociologist, historian and subaltern theorist. She draws upon anarchist theory, and Quechua and Aymara cosmologies. 10  Gautier, Ana María Ochoa (2014). Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-­ Century Colombia. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

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an artist who is more universal in the sense of traveling the world? How do you like to identify yourself? XA: Very pretty question and a difficult one too. I am never a British artist. That’s clear because the only thing British I have is the passport and that is because of convenience—it never was really a cultural goal for me. It was really a document convenience thing. I am a Colombian artist; I say I am an artist but sometimes it depends on the biography and where you send it. What is their point? So I have to be defined as a Colombian, but I say artist/sound artist. The other identity is as a migratory artist and the other identity now is a sonic migration artist; that’s more what I am. When it comes to nationality, I’m a bit more inspired actually here by philosophers that choose the freedom of the migrant against nationalisms. Yes, I do not like to identify as a Colombian when people create an idea of what a Colombian is. I was actually talking today with my collaborator from INTIMAL from Colombia. I was telling her that if I had the opportunity to have a job anywhere in Latin America, I would choose Mexico. Sometimes I feel more kind of Mexican but sometimes I say, ‘No, it’s probably Latin American’. That is also a big problem because we have an issue of identity within Latin America; we are just a mix of so many things. I like Latin American as an identity if it’s national because it’s trans-national. I think it is in search. It’s a search on an individual level, but it’s also interesting that now we have the collective search with the INTIMAL collective. This is a part of the research because if I go live in Spain, they will start talking to me in Moroccan because I have long hair and in the summer I look like a Moroccan, or even in Bangalore when I stayed there sometimes I passed as a local, so they didn’t treat me as a foreigner and that was clear to me. I also like to have this possibility to have this mix. Yes, I like the mix. BC: The confluence of different elements exists within you. XA: Yes. When something starts to be so defined—probably it’s my lack of focus because I take things at a very micro level—I escape. BC: Do you engage with the audience in your work? Do you have a strategy of engaging with the audience through a process of community building or as a process of connecting or as a process of entertaining the audience? XA: Yeah, the last one is very difficult for me. Entertaining, I’m not into that; it’s difficult. It includes the audience, and the only perfor-

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mance where I have been half successful was in the first telematic performance, ‘Letters and Bridges’. I had the performers, improvisers (there were six artists improvising) and I had the other thing called active audience and then I did a workshop with them too both in Mexico and in Leicester where I was living. I recently was sending its video for a podcast and I noticed that ‘wow that was nice.’ So the active audience I like but the audience as entertainment is very difficult for me. It is because I focus on the performers or improvisers’ experience. I forget the audience, sometimes I feel like I don’t care but I have learned that I have to care. So it’s in development. I very recently (one weekend ago) had a very wonderful experience: I was invited to lead the tuning meditation of Pauline Oliveros in a documentary festival in Navarra. It was all physical; there was the closing ceremony where they were giving the prizes to the filmmakers. Actually, there was an active audience and I had to work on that. I had to prepare how to introduce this, how they will sound, how I make them sound, and that worked very well. I was a bit nervous; I do not like to work with so many people. I usually work with 10 or 12, but there were almost 100 people and I had to make them sound as Pauline Oliveros was doing. It was really nice and there’s a way to do it. I don’t know if it was necessarily with these kinds of sounds, or with tuning meditation but I did it also in Medellin—I do workshops and they actually become performances. My audiences, if I want to engage them, become performers. There are so many ideas (I wrote about this in one of the papers of the performance of INTIMAL) that are about audiences engaging with technology. I think there is a lot of work in that, but I am not focused on that. I would love to have a collaborator who would think about audiences better than I do. For me, if I work with them, I engage them until there is no audience. Are they participants? Participants, yes. Is it a kind of community building for you? Yes, definitely. I think that’s where we will stop for now. Okay Budha. Thank you very much for these very nice questions, it helped me to think a lot about my work and where I am coming from.

CHAPTER 7

Hardi Kurda

This conversation was recorded on Zoom, where we had some technical glitches. Kurda later edited the transcription to clarify a few sentences. I know Hardi Kurda since the Irtijal Festival 2019 in Beirut,1 where we shared stage. In 2021, we collaborated on an event as part of The Listening Biennial.2 BC: How did you come to artistically work with sound and listening? HK: I started playing music when I was very young. It was after the revolution in Kurdistan-Iraq in 1991. In the beginning it was through the practice of music at home when I found a harmonica in my aunt’s house, and then I started playing violin at the institution for fine arts at the Sulaymaniyah hometown. I started my sound practice from there, but it was also a very important moment during this time between getting to the institution for fine arts, playing music and my brothers’ radio repairing shop in the city. I was practicing violin in this shop during lunchtime when it was hot—maybe 35 or 40 degrees, but that was the only chance I had to practice. There was no studio place to practice, and at home Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Hardi Kurda—HK.  See: https://irtijal.org/irtijal-2019-overview/  Kurda organized the Kurdish site of the Biennial that I co-curated: https://listeningbiennial.net/sites 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_7

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there was no place for practice. Nonetheless, I had a lot of interest in radio without having an intention to question the radio medium, and was very fascinated by how when my brothers opened a radio there were noises coming from the radio. They touched the circuit with wet fingers to hear if the radio worked or not. Of course, in this time there were not so many interesting programmes on the radio; most of them played the news, especially BBC London, Monte Carlo Paris, Voice of America and some new local radio stations. I was just playing violin at the shop but the noise and voices from the radio were unconsciously integrated in my mind along with the sound of the strings. It was the first time listening became a noticeable activity in my life, and was tied to the political situation. After the school of music, I became interested in playing different types of music from folk music, Western classical to pop music, but I always wanted to change something in the music I played or composed. Listening to the radio and the atmosphere in the radio repair shop always brings me back to that moment where music and the sound of revolution interconnected. I always had the intention to change the sound and the way of listening to music. I didn’t like to play what I heard from other musicians; I was not trying to challenge them but was instead creating other spaces and developing the way we created music in this time. First when I experimented and composed some pieces, no one was listening to it. It was not familiar for the listener or even for the musician. They thought it was weird how I changed the sound of the instrument and brought new sound material for the composition. But, for me, it was more about the opportunity of exploring, for example, the folk music instruments—I just wanted to explore the sound of folk music instruments. Without relating to the knowledge of how this instrument is played, I tried to embody another knowledge through listening and exploring new sounds. When I started my illegal journey to Europe (I immigrated), I was in a container ship from Turkey to Italy for 90 hours—4 days. I had a small radio hidden with me, so the smuggler couldn’t find it. I knew I would need the radio to track myself in this container because I knew this is the only tool to help me track where I am through the frequencies. For example, I heard the voice of radio stations from Greece, but I knew the sound of the language changed. Besides, I had radio noise for 90 hours to listen to without stopping—tracking and lis-

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tening and listening. So the listening was intense and urgent. That was the beginning of how the way of listening changed my perception of sound, voice, and noise, which later shaped my sound practice. The listening practice and listening situation, how I listened to the noise was not how I normally listen to sound. Rather, I listened to the noise as a portal or a way to get out of this place and to hear something outside to show me something different, although to gather information that helps me to survive; a sort of tactical listening. On the other hand, it was a way to avoid listening to what was happening in this container atmosphere; I mean the other voices outside the container, the staff from the shipping container. The funny thing was I had a one side headphone for my small radio, it was not stereo. I challenged myself to avoid listening to what was happening in one side of my ear because when I listened to that, I also heard from the other side of my ear. I had no choice. I had to force myself to not listen to the people outside the container, the staff people. I got stressed, because I was an illegal passenger, if I had been found, I would have risked my life. Therefore, for me, listening in this time of crisis or situation was a matter of survival. On the other hand, I enjoyed focusing on listening to the radio noises to discover another world. To do that, I needed to interact with the other senses as a tool to listen and communicate differently. Therefore, my works are based on how the listener perceives my sound works. It is not just the compositional material or structure that are my questions, rather I also focus on the materiality related to space and time which demands from me to think about the materiality of the place; it forces me to think about the work, performance or exhibit. For example, the ECG monitor for the hospital, The Bus project, which I will talk about later. My sound works are always related to material that comes from a specific space and time to shape new listening experiences. BC: And also, perhaps you can talk about the participatory aspect of it? HK: Yes, yes definitely. The piece that I made in 2015 for the hospital machine—the ECG machine—interacting with the human body via sound through the inner senses is one of the pieces in which I called the found score ‘ready-made score / graphic diagnosis’ from everyday materials. But compared to the found object, the ­listening connects the space with the material. It is something interconnected with each other—It creates another meaning. Thus, the

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participation in this piece is important especially in the hospital environment to experience another way of listening. When you were going through this trajectory of sound practice, did you have a kind of canon in front of you which influenced you? For example were there musicians, artists, thinkers or writings that you followed or that influenced your work in growing up during your formative years? Yeah, I knew John Cage from the beginning when I immigrated to Europe. Then as a composer also I learnt from Stockhausen, Xenakis, Feldman, Varese—I’ve been very interested in their scores and the way they think about music composition and sound. That’s the early stage of my composing music. Then I started to become also close to sound art, experimental music and listening practices. While doing my PhD research, I started to be interested in Salomé Voegelin’s book Listening to Noise and Silence. Also, deep listening from Pauline Oliveros where she talks about listening as a survival tool or instinct. There are many artists and scholars who I became interested in through my reading and who inspired me. For example, Brandon LaBelle in his book The Other Citizen3 and you Budhaditya. I am very inspired by your book The Nomadic Listener.4 I found some common practice from a non-European sound artist. But the one who is going on to still strike me from the beginning, and has continued to inspire me, is John Cage. He started all these ideas to be more investigating, made me more curious to go inside the composition—this scope of happening and improvising. Therefore, I am reading about ‘sound art’. It makes me curious about discovering new ideas and new thinkers. Did you have any canonical interactions with artists from the Middle East or Global South—musicians, performers, thinkers from Kurdistan, or Iraq? You mentioned pop music. Yeah. Some of them are not just from the musical aspect but also from the theoretical aspects from the middle east. However, from a performative aspect, for example, we have local singers or ritual singers from the Sufi side; the way they approach their ­surroundings of performance is very interesting and I’ve become very interested in this type of performance lately. One of the singers is called

 LaBelle, Brandon (2020). The Other Citizen. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press.  Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (2020). The Nomadic Listener. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press.

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Sheikh Mohammed Safai who is very local but the way he performs, in local weddings or rituals—the way he uses his voice and the body—it’s very related to, for example, how a mullah articulates (sing is not right word), the Quran. They always have the hand on their ears to listen to find intonation, to listen to their voice resonate inside their head. So it is not just about reading, it is also about listening inside their head to feel the space that can help to articulate words. This guy, the Kurdish singer, also used this method in his performance with his head to change the sound in the room. Safai was aware of listening to his surroundings when he performed. He spread his voice in the room to hear himself and to reflect on it. It was not changing unintentionally; it was an awareness of how to embody listening in his performance. He was moving his body when he wanted to change the colour and acoustic of his voice in the room. The listening in the room and how he performed was so intense. I didn’t directly use this approach in my practice, but I was very inspired by how he used the technique from the religious ritual act to and for nonreligious rituals. He just took the technique of listening and extended it to his way of performing for weddings and other social parties. In 2008, my bachelor’s research was about some listening aspects from ritual sound and music from Southern and Eastern Kurdistan, the part in between Iraq and Iran called Hawraman—their origin goes back to Zarathustra. When they sing, they are using the old Zarathustra testament book Avesta in the original language, so their language is different from the modern Kurdish language, and they have their own songs, which they call Hurra, it was a ritual song as well but not now.5 The interesting thing is how they related their song to their surroundings in nature—in between mountains and with a special bird called Kew. Therefore, they don’t prefer to sing inside their house but the best situation for them is to sing in the mountains with the Kew because of the natural acoustics and the freedom to open their voice into nature, the way they interact with each other and their intonation is different from modern Kurdish culture. The way they sing is related to the way of the mullah I mentioned before. Maybe this kind of technique has been discov5  Avesta is the sacred book of Zoroastrianism containing its cosmogony, law, and liturgy, as well as the teachings of the prophet Zarathushtra.

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ered very long back or it is also there in other folk singers in other places. However, when I did this research it was about Hurra’s interrelation with the song of the Kew: the bird is listening and reacting when the people are singing Hurra. The question was if the bird brought this kind of song gestures to the song, or if the people influenced the bird. I did this research and tried to see if the bird has the capability to change the melody or not. Because the bird also has a family from France and England, but they are not similar in singing. Kew has a very special position in the Kurdish national history; it is a symbolic icon of the Kurdish bird and thus is called Kurdish bird. In this situation, I studied how to create a listening space with the bird—how they sing, how they act and where they placed the bird in the mountains. They learn naturally this way about how they listen to each other. As I said before they have their own tuning based on listening to themselves through nature; they don’t care about the tuning being perfect. The most interesting thing is how keeping the breathing long is more important than the tuning to sing Hurra. Then came my question of what happens in listening—are they actually listening to each other when they sing, or are they just waiting for one to finish and for the other to come. The answer was, they are listening to each other and the birds. Otherwise they cannot interact, and the acoustic in the mountains sounds so far and deep it is like a long echo. When the voice comes back from the echo, they keep another reason for interacting with it. They practice their intonation with nature when it comes from the mountain, and when the mountains give them another sound colour, they take it to continue singing with the bird—a sort of communication with nature—ecological acoustic. BC: Right, but do you think this bodily listening practice and its connection to nature—embeddedness with nature—is something that is disrupted when you move to Europe, through your European experience of listening? HK: Yeah, true. What I still miss, what I still try to find in my work as I also said before, is thinking about the relation of material with its own place; I try to create a space for the listening experience to be related to the materiality of the place. So, it doesn’t matter how the acoustic is, this acoustic and other materials are the identity of this place. So, from the Western world’s perspective, there is this kind of perfectionism, ‘music should be perfect’ and especially in this

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stage where I came from, composition and the music are played in the concert hall and have a historical dimension to interpret through listening and so on. That was not related to me; that was always something totally I missed because to me listening was not the composition, it was the experience in the moment. To give you a very clear example, I tried this kind of listening in my scores. I mean I tried to illustrate this listening experience. I got a commission to compose for Ensemble Recherche in Freiburg for a piece called The Latest News.6 I deconstructed the composition of the city map of Freiburg with the different drawing shapes and the latest newsletter of the day from the city. That was my composition material, and I asked the performer to wear a pulse oximeter for tracking the time flow of the music. I just said—try to create the listening moment while you are recomposing the city map again and playing it, not improvising but playing the piece. So, in this sense all the material integrated and then shaped a new listening, because like improvisation it was not clear what comes after what. Nonetheless, the performers knew how they played the piece and then naturally they gave a kind of expression and expectation to the audience which in the moment displaced them to another space and time where it connected the city to the event that happened in this place. Thus, I tried somehow creating the same atmosphere as the guy singers in the mountain in Hawraman. They don’t know what the mountain gives them back, or the acoustics of that day. But they trust themselves and they trust nature and they trust the Kew bird; they feel the connections, that is. But they don’t know what the sonic response will be expected. It was the same kind of way that I tried to explore in this performance score for ensemble recherche. The score offers the musicians to be inspired by not just the sound from the other musician, but also from choosing the material from the score and responding to how they interact. So, I have always been kind of missing the improvisational element that I challenged to apply in my scores—which does not relate to the score. That is why I am going back to Cage again about the idea of happenings, but focusing on the correct direction of a composition otherwise it will mislead the concept of the differences and common aspects between composition and improvisation. So, what is 6

 More information on the artist’s website: https://hardikurda.com/the-latest-news/

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happening in this case, in some research, is that the listening is not just taking place in the moment; it is also a fact that integrates with the choice of the next step of the score. The visual aspect takes over. In my composition, it is both choosing the score and listening, but the most interesting to me was their choices when they decided—it was not depending on what the other musician played. They decided based on the situation which was urgent, and reacted and reflected on the listening moment; it could also be an imaginary or speculative listening. Therefore, it is essential in my work to communicate with the materiality of the score to know what could come next. It is not a listening space to make judgement or interplay, that’s all I have experienced before and during the journey inside the container. I had to speculate on how I could get a score of information from listening to sounds inside and outside me. It is similar to a listening practice when I am listening to the paper with a drawing or notation. Nonetheless, there is something certain, I know what I am doing but I don’t know why, so it is kind of back and forth between knowing and not knowing. BC: When you posit yourself in the European environment and practice your listening and sound, how do you like to see it from the outside? Is it a kind of detached, disembedded from the knowledge of nature and the imaginary and the subjectively guessed sound? Or is it something to do with measurements, precision, objectification, machine, and something like that? HK: Yeah, good question. BC: What is the difference between (so to speak) Western and non-­ Western in the field of sound practice and listening approaches in your understanding as an artist? HK: When I think about this question, I try to kind of forget what I know about the Western knowledge of listening first. So I imagine going back to somewhere else, to place myself outside this frame of Western knowledge. Otherwise, it would be too much knowledge of the West when I am reflecting on this question. For me, when I listen, of course there is so much in my background that affects how I listen and how I experience it except for my listening practice from the shipping container; so I try to keep this as much as possible. When I think about listening, I have that knowledge embedded into who I am but when I am practicing listening, I try

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avoiding all those practices because otherwise I get lost in between practice and knowledge. I always found in my listening experiences an urgent need of communication with another layer of sound. It is deeper than attention to what I see or hear with the whole body of listening with the other senses. What I was missing in listening in the context of hearing the sonic environment and seeing is that it was talking very less about the other senses such as smell/breathing, taste and temperature which is for me connected to my experiences that embodied another listening knowledge. If I am connected to listening from a more spiritual way so to say, (or not a spiritual way but deeper than that maybe existential), this kind of listening gives me the opportunity to think and gives me the possibility of space to interpret how I feel. Furthermore, the listening that already has a preoccupied knowledge; even in the sound art in the West, most of them are bombarded with the ways of many great thinkers, how they think about sound art and music—even visual art as well. For me, listening is an urgent act. In my case, I explored it through the context of the found score, everyday material that offered listening to the other senses. Maybe you don’t need to have this kind of listening when you are standing and listening to something or watching something and imagining how it sounds. Listening can be a small moment that can happen and give you a sense of something that you never forget. Compare that for example, with how we listen to music and how many of those are stuck in our memory and experience and are never forgotten. That was the question for me: it must go somewhere deeper, get stuck somewhere and ask how it is stuck here and why. And that is why I am going back to the relation between all those other materials, space, time and the material, and the environment when the listeners are involved as in the listening. So, they all know a fact about how this sound/music and why it is stuck here and why this listening is so much deeper than the other listening situation. Anything to do with embedded knowledge? In the sense that most of the listening that you grew up with, for example the folkloric music, the radio, the atmosphere, the radio preparing shop and the migratory experience—do you think that these experiences are displaced in the European context, when you exist here as a ‘sound artist’ defined through a Western canon?

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HK: You mean how they see the way I think, yeah? BC: Yes. HK: I’ve been struggling even from the beginning. I mean the way the Western always looks at my way of practice was very Eurocentric. For example, I made a piece, and they were always waiting to hear folk music from my music which was not my interest. I wanted to explore this way of listening and be so critical in the way I compose in general and how I make music in general but the way how they expected to listen to my music was totally different. And that is because just my background kind of created this expectation for them. I remember I used an oriental instrument in one of the festivals in Europe and the listener didn’t think that it sounded like an instrument from the Middle East because I had totally disturbed this instrument to make them listen just to the sound of the instrument instead of where this instrument came from. I mean, not eliminating the instrument’s background and where it came from, but like other experimental music you just explore and see the possibility of the instrument. But in my case, it has always been a preoccupied judgment before hearing it, yes. BC: Do you like to discuss the idea of perspective and temporality in your work? Is it different the way you perceive it from a Eurocentric listening ear? Or is it different from the perspective and the temporality you grew up with outside of Europe? Different perspectives include depth of field, geometry of spatial acoustics, and temporality in terms of durationally or length. HK: You mean I have changed since I came in and immigrated? BC: Yes. HK: Yeah, it has changed a lot and it is still changing. It is still changing and new ways of listening are being discovered but this goes from the same point of view that I just want to dig more. As I started from the instrumental and the sound of the instrument, now I am digging and questioning the space and materiality related to listening. Now, this idea is shaping my works. Before that, I composed a piece from the visual aspect, the notation and then the sound came after that. Now I listen and have those questions in my listening practice and process and then I compose. I do try to put myself as an audience to see how to listen and appreciate it. That’s why for example in my piece for threesolos in 2009 I remember my profes-

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sor from Gothenburg told me, ‘when I come out from the ­performance I don’t remember anything, I don’t remember any material from this piece’ and I said, ‘this is for me like freedom of listening, I want the listening experience to be there in the moment; when I come out from the concert hall I don’t want to remember anything’. I want to create curiosity to go back and listen for the next time. However, when I go back and listen to the same piece, I don’t want to create any expectation because the piece would be different from the last time. So, for me, this kind of change is a shift from the fixed listening experience of a piece which mostly comes from the Western notation that created a problematic for listening and not challenging the listener’s way of listening, not offering a space of freedom. I mean being an active listener, good listener, or critical listener, etc., has various meanings, interpretations, and experiences. However, remembering the piece, it may have a lot to do with the composer’s hierarchy. That is why I want to critically work on this aspect of who decides how it sounds. From the place where I came from, it was different; I wanted to create a listening atmosphere where when I am in the space that the piece is being performed I want to be enjoying like an audience. That is why I leave this kind of notation that limits my listening experience during the performance because I was not listening; I was just thinking about if they played it right or wrong, and for me a big part of listening was missing. So that is why I created a new way to work with a score in a different practice method that also gives me this opportunity and gives this right back to me to try exploring various ways of listening to my pieces. And by giving this listening moment to the audience, they are very curious to come back next time and the time after that because each time it is very different. So, this part I can say is somehow related to my background and the lifestyle in Kurdistan—the temporality of not having control to fix or organize things, just deal with it. When you go out in Kurdistan you never know what happens when you come back, nothing can be planned. It is not just about war; it is a cultural and social lifestyle and maybe it is a result of many years of political failure that couldn’t create a functional system. Therefore, I needed to deal with this kind of lifestyle where things are in their own temporality, not functioning, not perfect. And things are all changing simulta-

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neously, kind of feeling free and making me more creative to things because I need to think creatively in the moment. Otherwise, I couldn’t follow, otherwise I would be lost in that moment but not in the moment itself, the past of the moment, thinking of the past in the moment. That influences my work as well. BC: Is it your way of challenging the power hierarchy and the power structure and decolonise? HK: Yes. The last piece I wrote for a string orchestra which was about decomposing, or the non-hierarchy composition focuses on listening. The funny thing was the conductor being quite angry with me because he thought I had been rude with him by taking away his control, but I just asked him to listen instead of conducting; this was a piece for listening, not conducting. I get this idea from reflecting on a story: when I was in Gothenburg state library and I saw a big picture of the Swedish parliament, I saw how they were sitting; they were sitting like an orchestra structure with the conductor in the centre. This is a kind of irony I see with the Western system. The way people think is still very hierarchical. On the other hand, in Kurdistan we have a nonfunctional and hierarchical government but the people, the society are working collectively and this is missing in the Western society. Most of the time people are helping each other, something connects to other things, and you never know what it is, it just happens. And that structure of hierarchy has always been my biggest problem working with the Western musicians. I remember once I met a composer from Berlin and he saw one of my scores. The score is just one-page, it is called Shadow Dimensions. He described it very well; he said it is like a football strategy, and I answered—‘but what is the problem with football? Is it not about collaboration like music?’ To put the ball in the goal is what we need in music—to hold listening in focus. He told me that the Western musician’s job is like a killer’s. You pay, they play, don’t ask them too much, otherwise they get confused. They didn’t learn the way of freedom in music school—to collaborate and listen. It was different from the place where I played music, which was a listening centre for all the works. Notation was something sometimes we did to joke or sometimes we did just for archival, or we did it because it was a little bit fancy and academic when we read notation. But it was not the music. We mostly listened and

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we played, like folk music. Of course, it was not improvisation; we knew what we were playing. However, to be creative as a composer is so problematic with these musician’s with knowledge from the Western because you can’t be creative because then your music will be played by musicians who have already fixed knowledge of performance and a way of listening to sound. I don’t think there are so many musicians in Western that learn the instrument through just listening; they learn an instrument through technique. There are also fantastic musicians, they explore things, but I am talking about the general aspect of the Western musicians. And there is not so much openness with the composers as well. I discovered through my experience and in my field and other artistic disciplines that sound artists are flexible and are open in a sense of listening because of the diversity of the field. I remember when I was in Leipzig one year on an exchange. I presented the same score I shared with the composer from Berlin. My professor told his students, ‘Look, we don’t know if this is music or not, if that is a composition or not, but I know he is doing what he wants. But actually we cannot do what we want because we come from a tradition that has roots in so many rules that we cannot just get out of those rules, we are abandoned. He created a score that deals with the moment.’ Then it is another question if you call it music or not. This was a nice compliment. I see composers and musicians from the Middle East living in Europe, their music sounds like a Westerner composer and even the audience is questioning that we don’t understand your music. But it is interesting if Westerners play or sing music from other cultures. This reminds me of a quote by one of the thinkers from the Middle East—from Iran—Hamid Dabashi. He is a student of Edward Said, and a professor of English literature in the United States. In an interview about his book Can Non-Europeans Think, which is an inspiring book with a critical aspect exploring non-Westerner thinkers and critically reflecting on why the Westerner thinker thinks on the non-Westerners’ thinkers.7 He reflected on the way the Western thinkers still do not have issues to understand his language, not from the linguistic perspective of course. It is about the pre-rejection they made. Dabashi thinks it is 7

 Dabashi, Hamid (2015). Can Non-Europeans Think? New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

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about the fear for the new age of thinkers coming from non-­ Western cultures. He believes the new European culture will be shared by those other than the Europeans because we have both backgrounds. From this perspective, maybe hearing experimental music from a non-Western artist is a new challenge for European culture and society. Recently, a book by Cedrik Fermont and Dimitri della Faille under the title Not Your World Music: Noises in South East Asia is exploring those artists and musicians working on electronic music in non-Western countries. I think the challenge is always about knowledge. The non-European knows what happens/ed on the other side of the world. So maybe the reason behind this sentence ‘I don’t understand you’ comes from the fear of knowledge. That is pretty much how I feel it in a way not in terms of saying and having new ideas or a label, but I experience this kind of fear of why they don’t want to listen to me. They have already created their interpretation of me. When I am talking about my music, they take it as a traumatic experience and I say, ‘you cannot just take it as a traumatic experience just because I am from the Middle East, and it is labelled as a war zone.’ I am talking about a situation that has created another way of listening in a creative way. But it is not traumatic, it is totally different because I am not suffering from a trauma, but it was an experience. I say for example, if you have a journey and you go to France let’s say, and your bus accidently is not working and suddenly you find yourself in the village, okay. You don’t know this village or who is living there, you have no choice, and it is not about the risk, but you try to be aware to protect yourself and so you try to deal with the situation as an adventure from your journey. This experience may change your life. It was the same for me during my illegal journey when I immigrated to Europe, it was another story and not just stories that you see in the news or in the media because that’s not how I experienced it. We already discussed a bit the question of identity, but I was wondering about the identity that you like to evade from or you like to suggest. If there is any identity such as let’s say a Kurdistani artist or Middle Eastern artist to just being an artist or a global artist— these kinds of different boxes of identities are available for curatorial purposes. Are you challenging this notion of identity making as a practitioner, or as an artist? Or do you aspire to have no identity?

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HK: There was a time when I struggled to emphasize this aspect of identity in my music because it is the first thing you face in the diaspora and I found myself lost in answering it not because I didn’t know the answer, no. The idea of identity has a political reference with me as well when it comes to the question of ­Kurdish-­ness, etc. So, I try avoiding that sort of concept of identity that limits the opportunity of self-expression rather than a national or cultural expression. For example, I am not interested in showing in my music where I came from; for me it is about who I am now living in London. I spent a lot of years of my life being in various places and experiencing living and integrating with different cultures, so for me sometimes I am saying that it is enough that my surname is Kurda. Of course, my music is Kurdish but what kind of Kurdish? Does the Kurdish come from a ’Kurdish music’ that has a limited definition? Of course, not. It is different, it is my Kurdish and that is me. Nonetheless, this experience of questioning identity resulted in creating several projects in my hometown. I explored with local artists the meaning and purpose of identity in music. In the end I landed on another interesting question that led me to think about how crucial it is to promote local audiences to a new field of sound and music. Therefore, one of the projects I did after the Hurra and Kew bird, was in 2013—The Bus. The project focused on public spaces and questioned listening in relation to the environment. At the same time it also questioned social classes after the ’developing economy’ in this region and it was also a manifesto for the lack of communication between cultural institutions and the people. How are we playing? Politicians, specific social class, or people? Therefore, after a couple of years I started Space21 as a platform for experimental music and sound art focused on public space and promoting local audiences in Kurdistan region in Iraq. It is not just with or for Kurdish artists in Kurdistan, it is also about Kurdish artists in the diaspora and international artists. The artist is coming from different places and cultures and is using the materials in this place to create new listening experiences for the local audience. In this context the materiality of the place for me is the reference point for the identity in Space21 projects. For example, the sonic materiality of the Hammam project (public bath) I did in 2019. I will talk about it later. It is interconnected— when I include space-time and the question of materiality. You

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understand what I mean? I sometimes tell my international friends, when you’re in Kurdistan and working with the material from this place and performing for Kurdish audiences, then you are a Kurdish. And, when I am in Germany, making music for the audience residence in this place, I am a German artist. Why not? A ­temporality in identity based on the cultural value and not a political or economic value. We belong to the place we are living in now and our identity is ourselves in the moment. So, for me, identity is very temporal and that is why my works are based on the temporality of the moment. BC: This fluid malleable identity is something that equips you perhaps, to aspire for something universal. Is it something universal that you aspire for as an artist? Universality? Or is it something migratory without having any identity? Which is preferable to you? HK: Both could be right in a different way actually; both could be right. I remember when I did a composition performed at Universeum, a science centre in Gothenburg in 2016, I had a couple of school classes to play with the piece called ‘The Found Score of Recycled Objects’ for a projected score and sounding table. The kids asked me where I came from, and I asked them back, ‘do you see the Star Wars films?’ And they said yes. They are not talking about countries, not even planets, they are talking about galaxies. And I am from planet Earth. The situation was so relevant to the way I present myself. Behind me was a spaceship exhibition, so kind of connecting, presenting myself without exaggerating anything is just the reality. I am from this planet and this planet is my home. But on the other hand when you are questioning identity from the musical aspect, it is pretty related to my practice when I am composing and is related to the materiality of the place. I feel like the pieces are from nowhere and everywhere. I discuss this aspect in my PhD research. And I am not saying it in a negative way. I mean for me, it’s a kind of freedom and creativity. BC: Migratory, nomadic. Universality has some issues—it’s a problematic term. Universality is an a-priori knowledge, an episteme which is all-pervasive and in this epistemology, there are power structures that we always avoid, or we don’t talk about. But migratory or nomadic identity, if there is any, or a lack of identity so to speak, doesn’t have this all-pervasive aspect of it.

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HK: I don’t know how it is relevant to connect this example with the issue of universality. For me, nomadic is also migratory, fortunately. Some would say, unfortunately, but I say fortunately because it’s in the nature of a Kurdish community or Kurdish society. The piece I did for the Sounding Carpet in 2017 is an interactive sound art that explains this aspect of nomadic stories and that is how I ­differentiate Kurdish carpets with Persian, Turkey, or Arabic carpets. Those neighbouring countries were always colonial. Therefore, their carpets were big; they were emperors, they had big castles, so they needed big carpets. However, Kurdish society was most of the time a society of nomadic people who moved between those countries so they couldn’t afford a big palace. They were forced to move to the mountains, and they could just carry small carpets, and most of the time they used carpets to write their stories, which is why I cannot find those stories on other carpets. I am talking about ancient carpet design. However, Iranian carpets have a common design with Kurdish carpet but not with the same stories. And this kind of nomadic or immigratory I feel, exists in my everyday life. I sometimes feel like it doesn’t matter where I go because everywhere I go, as I said this story of nowhere is everywhere for me and it feels like home. Except for the language: I think the only thing that keeps me belonging to where I came from is the language, not music. BC: The last question for me was to understand your idea of the audience. How do you interact with them as a sound performer? Is it something related to a frontal interaction where you produce something and they consume (this a very capitalist mode of sharing). Or is it more collaborative, where entertaining an audience for consumption doesn’t matter? HK: Participants in my work are very essential because they are part of the creation. As I have mentioned in the beginning of the conversation, when I compose, I think about how audiences perceive the work. This is one of the things that I find really challenging when I am working and practicing even during improvisation. I am thinking simultaneously of all elements which are involved in listening; everything is connected to each other. It is like a matrix of connection between all the materials I have in my work, and questioning myself about how they will be perceived. For example, I had in one of my projects Open Ensemble 2015 performed in

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London Sound Place Exhibition and Gothenburg Magnet festival.8 The piece is for a chair, headphone and object, the audience is the listener and the performer who produces the sound in the room. To get to the audience I needed to get to the performer. Notation does not offer communication between the performer and the audience. That is why in some of my projects including the interactive sound art projects, there are no classic ways of performing the piece. I need to have direct contact with the audience somehow. Nonetheless, I am not excluding performers in my work. I am extending the role of the performer through listeners, who are both the composer and performer’s target. I want them to be a part of the listening, to be a part of the audience as well and that is why I am going back to this guy, the Kurdish singer, the Sufi singer Mr Safai. You see he is performing and sometimes an audience takes his percussion instrument Daf from him to interact, interrupt and react to his performance. So the audience is the listener and the performer as well. It is kind of an energetic thing that just happens in the room while they are listening and playing. In short, my works are based on how to create a performance strategy that opens the space for the performer/audience to be in the moment. BC: Is this kind of approach reflected in your work, for example in Hammam?9 HK: Yes. The piece in the Hammam (public bath) is about the sonic memory of this space. The title of the piece is Hammam’s Maqām and you could interpret it like a place of Hammam or the space of the sonic memory of Hammam. Just to open the door to the Hammam when I was chilling in the cold as it was like a museum for the audience; people had a lot of memories. Since there are not so many people going to Hammams nowadays, and this Hammam I worked on for this project is for women. It is called Mofti Hammam, it is located in the city of Slemani, my hometown. However, when I opened the Hammam for the Space21 festival in 2019, people could go there without being naked. First the association with the Hammam changed, going to a Hammam was like going to a sound gallery or museum. The place itself offered the audience the possibility to just go there without doing anything and to listen to the 8 9

 More information on the artist’s website: https://hardikurda.com/open-ensemble/  See: https://hardikurda.com/hammams-maqam/

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ambience of the space which creates a strong reference to the audience’s sonic memories, and is too emotional as well. The story behind Hammam’s Maqa ̄m piece is from an old mystery story in the city about a ghost in the Hammam in the nighttime. That’s why I made a field recording to hear and listen to what ­happens in the Hammam when it is empty between 12:00 AM at night to 4:00 AM in the mornings. In other words, I wanted to hunt that ghost and listen to their conversations, maybe their singing, I don’t know. Practically, I recorded the ambiance of the Hammam, but the interesting material in this recording comes when I listen to the Hammam’s ambience. I hear how a drop of water comes from nowhere and it makes so much resonance in this room which each time when I listen to this recording, is much stronger than any other music I have composed. Those water drops’ resonance created another language, a wonder sound which turned to be the sonic ghost for centuries in this city. After that project, I became much interested in the acoustic and sonic of the Hammam. We also have another story apart from the scary one: people used to joke and say to someone who has a bad voice ‘go sing in the Hammam’, or ‘it is better to listen to you singing in the Hammam’, or ‘your voice sounds better in the Hammam’. It is like a magic sonic space that turns a ‘bad voice’ to a ‘beautiful voice’. The listening in the Hammam is very original and creative and then if I compare that with the listening I had in the shipping container, it was similar in some senses with the listening experience in the Hammam. Listening in the Hammam also was an urgent act to collect information about sonic materiality. The Hammam forced me to be silent as much as possible until I felt myself hearing a voice inside my body that resonated in the Hammam. BC: Is it not more evocative—the situated listening to the Hammam than the recording of it? HK: The recording is just actually a kind of reference for me to be reminded of the experience which is also connected very strongly to the recording. I am sure someone who has not been in the Hammam will totally experience this recording in a different way. For me, when I was there in the nighttime and set up the recording, I was feeling a different kind of stress of demanding something because I was not expecting this sonic atmosphere, but I knew it

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was a situation in which I didn’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what I am expecting but at the same time I have this ambience surrounding me. I felt listening to the Hammam was a way to try to find myself standing for a couple of minutes without knowing where I am, and then starting very carefully to move myself. Sure, it provokes me, but I felt that when it started to provoke me, it made me think and change the direction of listening and think on the process of listening. To recreate this experience for the audience that came on the day of the exhibition, I played back the recording of the night, so they could hear the voice and the life of the sonic ghost that lived for centuries in this city where the people in the Hammam listened to its stories. They knew each other but had not had the chance to communicate. BC: Listening is more important for you than recording. Is the recording just a memory of it? HK: Exactly. It is a kind of reflection of a story that I had in Slemani—in the city of the Hammam—and of all my childhood sonic memories in this city. The very beginning of the time of the Hammam goes back to 250 years ago. When the city was built, people built five Hammams. They heard voices and strange sounds in the nighttime. The story of the ghost started from there. They thought it was a ghost inside the Hammam at nighttime. They were afraid to go, it was so dark and of course there was no electricity at this time, so they created stories about the ghost in the Hammam. This is one of the acoustic and sonic qualities of the Hammam that communicates with the people until now. Yeah, it was very nice to me—this story, the way this story was and exploring other stories. Okay, now we talk to this ghost to see what this ghost is saying. I just intended to listen to this story when I was there and still when I listened to the recording, I heard something because I know about the story so I was naturally trying to find this kind of connection. Therefore, the idea to playback the recording in the daytime for the audience in the same Hammam was the way to communicate with both night and daytime spaces, with the ghost and the people. I don’t know how much it is related to the topic, but I also found how people in Kurdistan in old times used sound as a communication tool. For example, there is an old Kurdish door design made of wood and metal, which I am going to write

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an article about soon. The door has two bells: One with the male shape sexual organ and the other with the female sexual organ. When knocking the door with the bells, the male bell is making sounds in the low register and the female is making sounds in the high register. It is interesting for me how the people in this time communicated with the sound. The society in this time did not allow a woman to open the door if a man was knocking. Socially it was not accepted. So, they used sound as a tool to identify the gender of the person behind the door. Very interesting. It was a great conversation. I enjoyed it very much.

CHAPTER 8

Mario de Vega

In 2019, Mario de Vega and I were invited artists in residence at iii, Den Haag.1 It is at iii that I first met de Vega in person. In 2021, I asked for his time to facilitate an in-depth conversation as part of this research. We met via Zoom and later planned to follow up while both were in Berlin. BC:

The first question that comes to me is about your initial stages— how you started work with sound. MV: You mean back in the days? The very beginning? BC: Yes, very early—the genesis. MV: I started doing more kind of performative works. Not precisely incorporating sound, but reflecting on sound in a way. Back in the days I was collaborating a lot with an old friend of mine, a mathematician. We had certain interests in common. And those events were more like games in a way. So, let’s say we developed something like rules—so later on, I could see these as scores. Basically a series of instructions that we will execute. And I think that was the first door to understanding the value of organised events in time, so to say. And right after that, I think, I started basically mixing. So, I started mixing tapes because at that moment I could not Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Mario de Vega—MV. 1

 See: https://instrumentinventors.org/residency/mario-de-vega/

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_8

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really afford buying records, and you could imagine, say, importing records to South America is not an easy thing especially if it comes from Europe. But, it started like that; basically mixing tapes, and manipulating the tapes, then later on understanding that I could cut the tapes and make loops and stuff like that. And I think it developed like this. I mean, slowly gaining more access to hardware or tools, later on getting finally my first computer, learning some programming skills. Yes, it started like that. BC: And when you started to work with sound, did you have any canonical figures or influences that were central to your practice or kind of influenced you in your trajectory? MV: Well, I was probably more influenced from the contemporary art side, let’s say. One of them is a person who basically introduced me to the notion of becoming an artist, and is a very important figure for me: Teresa Margolles.2 She doesn’t work with sound per se, but I mean, a lot of her practice is based on those energies in a way, so I think that was a very strong reference or influence in my praxis. Another person could be Santiago Sierra for example. Let’s say, it’s the same thing: he is not a person who is defined as a sound artist, but that’s what I found very interesting. Those people used the medium they needed. If the work/project needed sound, they included the material itself. In that concern, to be honest, I see multiple problems now, especially in the field of sound studies. I mean, it has become incredibly normalised and almost pointless in some cases. For me, it is way more important when you simply come to the field of sound because you need to work with sound, but you could also work with printed media or other kind of materials—in that sense these are way more open. BC: Yeah, for example, film sound. MV: Exactly. That opens up all kinds of possibilities. I think it is more on the thinking and how you approach these topics. It seems to me that we could discuss sound by seeing an image, for example, or we could just have motionless objects that reflect an acoustic phenomenon or the way we perceive that energy and so on. So, it doesn’t necessarily mean that if we need to talk about sound, we need an arrangement of loudspeakers, for example, which I think is precisely the point here. 2  One of the foremost Mexican artists of her generation, Teresa Margolles (1963, Culiacán, Sinaloa) is a visual artist who examines the social causes and consequences of death.

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Yeah, it is not necessarily sound as a medium or phenomenon, but listening: how we listen, and listening with a particular method, or listening with a capability of triggering different knowledge—the process of listening. That is often not given enough attention in sound studies, but it is more like how sound as a medium or material is involved in the artistic process that is often foregrounded. The shift from sound to listening is one method in this research. Can I ask you to elaborate on your early listening experiences and experiments? MV: I would propose to come back to the raw element of this. Let’s say before the human understanding of vibrations being sound, there is just a purely physical phenomenon. That is haptic; so it is a tactile material. So that is the part that fascinates me. So let’s say the listening condition we are talking about is not just with a cultural background or let’s say this contextual approach. It is a purely physical stimulus. And if we go there, if we really approach this physicality of the medium, we open a lot of other possibilities. That’s the part that I think is incredibly important now—the notion of the haptic. Then later on we could say that the empathic relation with the physical stimuli, and later on the cognitive process of that. So within these three divisions—I mean these notions of listening—how do you frame it? For me, it is just a purely tactile element; let’s say that we are surrounded by this force, by this presence in a way (if you want to call it like that), and the question here is how much can we codify? If we are capable of really knowing what is going around us; I wouldn’t know at all, but I would say: we cannot. I mean, we would have to develop some kind of filtering that sensorially, which allows us to deal with information, otherwise it is just simply too much. BC: Yeah. Our phone vibrates, and we touch the phone and understand the physical vibration of the object. In your work, there is always a very strong focus on the vibrational, on the material, on the physical, on the visceral aspect of sound. Where does it come from? MV: I am not sure if it’s about the visceral aspect of this energy. But it’s more trying to approach this as an omnipresent force. So it is basically trying to reflect on a very simple principle—everything is in permanent movement. So let’s say based on this principle we could say well, this notion of vibration, re-understanding sound, etc., is a permanent state. So is there a totality of things? I mean, all what

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human cognition could define as information could be read as sound and that’s the part that basically allows this practice to be so open, in a way. So that’s why I am not completely sure it is about the visceral part. I mean, that’s how the others could codify that stimuli, but for me, this research is about the totality—how could we really define this, if it’s possible? If you open conversations about, for example, overdrives and saturations and excess and acceleration of the audible, all these principles are on the table already because it involves these things. Probably another way to frame it is: it’s about thinking in condensed energies; energies not understood in a metaphysical sense, but as a purely physical phenomenon—I mean the liberation of those energies. What I found fascinating is how we humans approach this. Then we open a conversation about resonance for example—how a signal propagates, refracts and so on. And after all this, we say, ‘Oh, this is a sound’! I listen to something, but before all these apparatus, there is this long way, which is pretty much what I am trying to understand. I don’t have the answers myself, to all these questions! BC: Yeah. The physical element, the energy of sound and if we think about early humans who encountered sound as energy or phenomenon, they were concerned about survival and existence—from nature, such as the storm, thunder, animals, or rain, for example. And then bird calls also; they were aesthetically engaging with birdcalls through which melodies were emanating. So if we think from the very early genesis of human listening—the human listening faculty and the encounters with sound as one of the sensory modalities—drawing from this primordial idea of survival and existence with sound energy, how do you think about the ways in which we are working with technologies today through these trajectories? What is your impression about that? MV: I find what you just referred to is quite interesting. First, we come back to this notion of the rural; I mean, let’s say the raw aspect of these forces. It’s precisely talking about forces. We humans realise that there is something bigger than us so we are very small. So the magnification of this event is the part that I found incredibly relevant. That’s really the moment we have to see this part—how small we are. So how arrogant we humans have become; we think we can manipulate those forces, we think we can in a way domesticate all these phenomena. But I will say not at all. We are far from that and

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I think sound can show us this force. Let’s say there is something bigger than us, stronger than us, if you fight against it you will never win. That’s why we humans are so vulnerable to acoustic pressure; our ears are quite limited and if you damage it you damage it there is no way back. This is the part that I think is also very interesting. How do you deal with these borderlines and these liminal areas of perception until when you can go? BC: To go back also to the influences that you had, do you think there is a sonic canon you grew up with in Mexico and did you have a canonical understanding of sound as a field of study for investigation and also as artistic material? For example, Europe has a canon of classical music. In other words, I wonder about the canonical sounds that were driving you in your early days. Were there any Mexican musicians or composers or artists, performers or thinkers who were crucial in your early practice? MV: Many. So I think art is divided in epochs, so to say. So starting from the fact that Mexico is very picturesque acoustically also. So there is a long tradition of drama; it is a very melodramatic culture on multiple levels. So in the early days, I pretty much grew up like this with my grandmother listening to Boleros and that kind of thing. I mean it is not something that I was interested in, but it is something you are surrounded by because it is part of the culture. But I think I had a lot of luck in a way; I was lucky to meet certain people in my life. Because in a private environment, in a domestic context, I was not really surrounded by a family that was taking me to a museum or a concert and so on. But at a very early age, I met a group of people who showed me the value of a record, for example. So for me understanding why a vinyl record—if you have the first edition—is more expensive than if you have a replica of it, was something that was difficult to understand in terms of economic value, but later on, I understood the value of historicity—the value of the document. It started with psychedelia, for example, progressive rock, etc. Those records are expensive; those are collector’s items. When I was 12–13 years old, I started to hang out with these people a lot and they showed me multiple things ranging from something like Cro Magnon to Blue Cheer, Budgie, Guru Guru and then moving to more Krautrock from Germany—Faust and Can and stuff like that. Later on, I got introduced to more industrial music from England, for example—Throbbing Gristle

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and that kind of thing. That really confused me more, because it was something I really liked; the first time I listened to that, I said, ‘This is what I really enjoy’. The other part was too dense for me, too full of references that I was not really connected to. I am not saying that Industrial music is a connection to Mexico, but there is something around that—the urban landscape really makes you reflect on those things. After that I started to discover Fluxus for example, and multiple links to all these relations. So the notion of electro-acoustic music came really later, and that’s the part that I found really boring. For me it was the other axis, it was just navigating this wave, in a way. But let’s say it was this notion of getting involved into discovering things—basically digging holes and getting something from there. Because we have to think in a third-­ world country, that importing a record is simply too expensive; you will have to have a lot of money to have access to that. I didn’t, but I had good friends. So I had people—probably I had the biggest collectors in the country whose collections at that time were incredible, and now, it is just beyond—especially someone called Arturo Castillo. Those people know the value of the historical document, and trading or let’s say, the market. Back in the days, of course, there was no internet, it was all with fax and post; making an arrangement with people in Europe or the USA is easier now— you have an account on Discogs, and you have a network, for example. That was when I discovered all these things, and it was for sure a big influence. Let’s say discovering Milan Knížák or Nam June Paik, for example. I mean, stuff like that. This happened way before. I mean, this is the journey. BC: Were you, at this stage, aware about the so-called Global North/Global South or East/West binaries in sound practice? You mentioned about the ‘third-world’; were you conscious about the embedded differences and affordances, the culture-specificity and cultural intersections of being in and growing up in Mexico, and whether there was a difference with Europe’s sonic milieu? MV: Well, I would say that first, growing up in a lower-middle-class family, the preoccupations or questions were completely different. For me, having access to an airplane (so travelling, really) came way later—the first time I got invited to exhibit work outside Mexico, and later on, while going for residencies. So not at all. I mean, I have to say, I also probably don’t define myself anymore as a person

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coming from Mexico, so it’s just a hybrid—a kind of bastardism, a mix of different things. Even more precisely, my background comes from a gypsy community; my mother was a gypsy. So Romani culture is something else even. A Mexican is a mixture of multiple things: basically, it is a very dense mixture with a lot of layers, and if you add this Romani culture it is just completely bizarre and distorted. So for me, when you are inviting me to think of something like this, I would just say that Mexico is incredibly diverse. It is a highly populated country but the mixture comes from multiple perspectives and that’s pretty much how you probably define yourself. Let’s say if you see five Mexicans sitting at a table, all five of them will probably look different but all five of them have the same passport. So this is something that I find quite interesting—that it allows you to say ‘well, I have no fucking clue where I come from!’ It is just as simple as that! Probably this allows me to not have this national approach in my head; it is more about the praxis and that’s it. It is not about being a sound artist; you produce art and that’s it. So it can be (as we said before) a physical object, it can be a performance, it can be an installation, it can be a concert. So it is more about how you develop your own methodologies and how you approach these phenomena. BC: Yeah. I am very curious to know whether it is very much ingrained in the methodology on a very individual level, or if there are some cultural/social implications or obsessions and fascinations or orientations that are embedded from the background that we grow up with. MV: I think, yes. Absolutely, yes. I mean, coming back to Mexico, it is quite a complex country. We have first of all, access to the South; we are in the middle of the big South. But you also have the border, with one of the worst things that could happen. If you get to the northern part of the country, people want to have an American passport because it is just easy, and really in the border, you have two nationalities and you would probably pay your rent in dollars even if you are within Mexican territory. So it’s quite complex; it opens a long discussion on what an identity means. Also, coming back from the colonies—basically, we are a Spanish colony—and how the colonies developed—there is even a word for that—malinchismo. The notion of the translator comes from this fact; it means, what you will find in Mexico is people who come to the country

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bringing information; they bring their awareness and because of this, this is pretty much welcome. So it is a very open culture in that concern. But most of the time it is because you know you will have access to the outside. So this creates a lot of ambivalences, I would say. I think now it is changing; the new generations have a completely different approach to that because media gets globalised and basically if you have access to the internet, this notion is completely different. But if you don’t have that and if we think in the analogue, you really have to consider all these elements—the complexity, the political conflict in a country like that. BC: There are some structural elements that one may locate, for example, cultural backgrounds or being in a particular society or the environment—they imply certain kinds of approaches to some structural elements. For example, time, temporality, spatiality (how the space or perspective is understood) and also subjectivity/subjective position. While working with sound, these structural elements differ; many scholars have argued that they differ when there is a cultural background differing. For example, I come from India and I grew up listening to Indian Classical music and that implied a certain kind of listening approach in which temporality is not so linear. These kinds of structural differences might be there if we carefully consider the cultural backgrounds and how that influences a sound practitioner. Do you think in your work there is a particular sense of time or space or subjectivity that is different from so-called European ways of listening? MV: I think what you make me reflect on is more in terms of mechanical reproduction. You bring me to thinking about mobile reproduction of cassette tapes. That for me is something that probably I didn’t consider before, but was for sure a very strong influence. Because I remember sometimes I would get a tape and I didn’t know what I was listening to—someone would write the name of the artist by hand, and most likely misspell something. There was this kind of obscurity of what was really happening there. And also, the latency of the object—let’s say that sometimes it gets stuck in the player, it gets broken and then you have to cut the tape and there is one segment of the whole missing, and most likely you will record over this. These artefacts are something that could be completely in a context like Mexico. Think in terms of if you come to Europe and pay let’s say 10–15 Euros for a CD (I don’t know who

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is still buying CDs but that is how much it costs); if you compare this in Mexican currency, you have to have a really good job or come from a really rich family to afford something like this. It is simply impossible otherwise because people need to basically find a day-to-day basis to live. In the 90s, the only option was that you had these tapes—let’s say a friend of yours helped you or allowed you to make a copy, and then you have a copy of the copy and probably three times more the copy. And with the signal decay, you are talking basically about noise and distortion in a way! Having a tape of Masonna for example—the third/fourth copy is not just the screaming, it is all the decay of the materials and this is something that I think has an incredible value. That is really how your hearing gets shaped also because the affordance of that is completely peculiar in a way. BC: Yeah, because then medium specific noise is something that you are aware about, such as the hiss—after many transfers from tape to tape, the tape hiss becomes far more prominent. Growing up with the tape hiss as a material, maybe it has influenced your understanding of sound? MV: Absolutely, yes. The beauty of dirt basically; I think still in my praxis there is the need to focus on the crooked or the irregularity of the artefact. It is not precisely the randomness or the error, but the instability of the situation. That comes from that but you had me reflecting now—it was really an unstable medium. Those references, I think, are precious to think about in the context. BC: Absolutely yes. Recording as a technology was a modernist tool in the beginning, a colonial tool in the hands of the coloniser to objectify/quantify a particular sonic phenomenon from the Global South because it was 1900/1902/1904 that was the period when colonial recordings were dispersed to colonial subjects—South Asia, Latin America, Africa. Colonial officers were sent to record sounds and recording technology intervened like an invasion. Do you consider recording an invasion? Do you think early recording technologies were limiting the scope of listening? MV: Hmm. Well, I remember I had a similar conversation with a good friend of mine who is a location recordist. I asked something ­similar—how do you approach a context? Let’s say you want to record something from a very close distance, how do you do it without distorting the environment or putting yourself in trouble?

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And the answer was that if you have a camera, it is way more invasive. I think it is absolutely true; if you come with video equipment and basically intervene in the surroundings, it is way more violent than if you come with a pair of microphones that most likely people will not notice. The moment people notice, maybe you simply say—‘Okay, listen, here’. and you open a completely different dialogue. And that concern I think makes me think more on the notion of intrusion. I mean, India has this too—for example, the notion of Aghoris who basically move away from living in the crematoriums because of the tourists, because of the judgements. Or let’s say the West judging the other parts of the world, it is the same thing in South America and Mexico—the West coming with this perspective, to judge; to say—‘the way you behave is wrong’ or ‘the way you eat is wrong’ or ‘you don’t have this or that’. These are indoctrinations; it is a big, big issue here. It is something we really need to reflect on and we need to discuss about this because it cannot be like this anymore. The roles are inverted already and this conversation helps me to reflect a lot on multiple things that I myself probably didn’t consider before. But coming back to this, it is not precisely the notion of invasion in terms of having a document that is a problem for me. It is about all the consequences after that. That is just a small part; the invasion comes in other manners. BC: Do you have any inputs about the colonisation of Latin America using sound as one of the mediums? MV: Well, how can I say it? BC: The way colonisation occurred, did it implicate a certain kind of listening or transformed the embedded/situated listening practices in a certain way? Did colonisation transform the situated listening approaches through its force and power and imbalance in power structures? MV: You mean if we talk very pointedly about the Spanish colony in Mexico? BC: Exactly. MV: Definitely. Let’s think of the friction of metal against metal. This is something that disrupted the whole environment. I don’t know the word in English, but you know what I mean. I mean, coming completely equipped with a layer of metal, of some kind of robotic approach. The environment was not even considering something

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like that. And like this example, you have multiple other ones. I think it was first of all a linguistic problem—the domestication based on the syntax of a language. The most sinister part was using religion as a tool to colonise—the notion of praying, the notion of repeating a phrase and stuff like that. Back in the days, this didn’t exist. The relation was more like an integrated ecosystem: people live in the system. So that definitely changed the notion of how we perceive acoustic activity—it is the indoctrination again. What makes me more aware of what you are talking about is really the notion of repetition. That is something that is incredibly meaningful in this conversation, I think. BC: Repetition? Is it something that was addressed in your body of work as it grew? MV: Not at all, I think what I am trying to develop as a praxis is a certain methodology or a way to approach these vibrational elements and forces as we discussed before. A system to basically offer self-­ awareness—the need to give you a moment for you to think within yourself and take your own decisions. An autonomous decision is—‘this thing is too loud, I leave’, ‘this is too long, I leave’, ‘this gives me something, I stay’. The notion of autonomy. So you can first be aware of your physical condition—thinking in this sense of psycho-motoric stimuli through signals, through amplified signals. That is more important for me. That is really something that is probably the main reason to be an artist. The other part I think doesn’t worry me so much—it is there and I cannot change it. So, what makes me much more excited is to have some kind of nomadic practice. It is similar to what you did already, moving from one place to another and being confronted with your background— where did you come from, why do we eat like we eat, why we have certain predispositions, why we like certain things and not other things. There are so many things here. But that is the part that gives me more. BC: Right. Is not being this nomadic entity or inviting a nomadic condition in your practice decolonial in a way? Is it not a resistance to the power imbalances? MV: I mean yes, it can be understood like this, but for me, it is more letting the work or the praxis to guide you. You probably agree with me, but how can I say this? Being an artist is very demanding. It is a full-time job; it is something that really requires a lot from

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your life, from everything you have. So the consequence with this is this nomadic approach—without having the decolonial aspect. It is simply the guidance of the praxis; the praxis needs this so you follow that. You follow these and sometimes you facilitate that, but I think now what I really want is just to follow it. So coming back to this autonomy, this possibility to make decisions is not the moment you say ‘I will do it’ or not. And that is some kind of micro freedom, so you can allow yourself to say, ‘I don’t do it’, and to get to that point is really difficult if you really want to live from the praxis, if you know what I mean. So that is the moment you say well, you have to be very consequent also; it is not just having great ideas, it is how you execute them, how you formalise it and so on. Is not the decolonial approach, if there is any, a political resistance—very personally speaking—in your praxis? I am not completely sure, because now I work for a German institution, so for me, the principle here is to dismantle the institution from inside. It is not an institutional critique, but we know institutions have failed; we know that. We all know this but we are still feeding that animal. So for me, the work in that field would be a highly contradictory approach if I would say yes, I have a political position. It’s probably a very different understanding here; for me, it is a social service. What I try is to give them the best I have. A service. Sharing my approaches, sharing my methodologies, making it very clear that in my point of view nobody can teach you to become an artist, this is simply not possible. What I can do is share my methodology; what I can do is to also share my failures, to say ‘well, I tried that and it didn’t work’, and so on. Maybe now, you are working with an institution, but when you first came to Europe or started to come more frequently and then moved here, did you not find the general interpretation of you as a Mexican artist from a European gaze problematic? I mean the identification, putting you in a certain kind of box or not giving enough exposure, or socially discriminating, because I personally faced discriminations in Europe. I understand what you mean, yes. Didn’t these conditionings anger you? Didn’t they put you in an activist/political position? Yeah, I really understand what you mean. When I came to Europe, the difficulties were other difficulties. First of all, I became a father;

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my son is already turning 12 this year. So the struggle was different. It was in terms of—okay, you want to be an artist, but for one reason or another of life, you have this responsibility. I think when I tried to come back, to rewind the tape and put myself in the moment I came to Europe, I think I was trying to be very honest with my praxis; so I was not trying to convince people. So I was not doing the work to be accepted or to be invited, and to be perfectly honest I think this has a very strong value—in very simple words, it is no bullshit. Really, it is not about licking the boots of somebody or saying ‘please invite me to this’. No. It is not that and it has never been that, and I think that has something to give. So probably because of this, I got possibilities here and I am actually very thankful—not just in Germany but in Europe in general. But you make me think of something that is crucial here—I was pretty much against this idea of being the Mexican coming to Europe. I was offered things like ‘We are making a showcase of Latin American artists we want to include you here’. I said—‘Well, no, that’s not what the praxis is about.’ BC: I will come to this question later—about identity. Often while coming to Europe from the non-West, there is an identity issue whether one (like us) would like to be considered with a national or cultural background as a baggage—like Indian artist, Mexican artist or African artist. Many artists are put into a box through this identification and this kind of indoctrination. MV: Absolutely. This is how we met. Last year we met in The Hague; I love these people, I think you also love them, but on paper you put, ‘Oh there is an Indian artist, there is a Mexican, there is a… ‘It’s perfect! So you say—‘yes, yes, yes, next grant’. So it works like this. We are also feeding this mechanism—probably unconsciously or completely consciously, but we are a part of this. But yes, definitely. It is more about how they solve the problems, how they solve the guilt. So let’s say, ‘Yeah it’s okay if we include this’ even if we are not talking about gender inclusion, because the problem is even bigger. But the question here is, is there a way to get out of this? Probably not. So that’s again an institutional failure. It is not about content anymore, it is about cultural politics. BC: Yeah absolutely. So, it is both ways. I’m not taking a position of thinking such things as ‘I don’t have any cultural background’. I’m curious about the implications of having a particular kind of cul-

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tural upbringing and listening. I’m curious about it; and I’m also curious how the question of identity is addressed and dealt with and negotiated with in everyday practice. For example, skin colour is something that is often a matter of concern—skin colour is something, background is something. This kind of identification is crucial in the way we establish ourselves in our fields. As you said, we are feeding a certain necessity, and diversity has become a very big issue today in Europe, but even 10–20 years ago it wasn’t there. MV: Because it is the hypocrisy of inclusion. So that’s again solving the guiltiness. The notion of multiculturalism—I mean, the European Union is falling into pieces, we all know that. What are we talking about? It’s incredibly complex and I think it’s very important to talk about, especially when we both are not Europeans. But we live here; we develop our praxis here, so I think it could be beneficial because of that. Let’s say there is an exchange. My problem, coming to this notion of identity, is really on how ‘products’ are sold. So one part is when the institutional framework comes and takes you to solve the problem of inclusion, but one that is really, really difficult to accept for me is when you sell yourself as that. When you really put yourself as a product with brands as radical, Latin American, pre-Hispanic, Techno-Shamanic ritual, and so on—this notion of identity is very delicate. That’s something that I completely reject, being close enough to give an opinion on that. That’s an area that, to me, opens a lot of problems. BC: Yes. And that is one of the reasons I personally consider trying to embrace a nomadic position. That is my response to the colonial mode of identification and the European gaze that is imposed on me. MV: Yes, I completely agree with you. I mean, I feel empathy because it’s a very similar approach. That’s the option now I would say— the value of mobility. In terms of signal transmission, refraction, and resonance, all these things we were talking about before is an execution of that. Where you move, you really propagate this and it resonates differently in each of the places. BC: Well, I would like to move to the next concern that is the idea of ‘sound art’. Do you call yourself a ‘sound artist’? I ask because sound art’s definition, genesis, emergence are all embedded in a breakaway from European classical music and then contemporary classical music and its liberation from those shackles. But it is a

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European phenomenon in the way it is understood: sound objects. How do you like to redefine, if you can do that in your work/praxis? MV: Oh that’s very difficult. I don’t define myself like that. So let’s start from there. We have talked even before, but for me, you are an artist and that’s it. So it can work with photography, it can be an object, it can be this or that. The problem is how others define you. So you don’t have full control on this. I think it’s this need to define and classify; to put labels on people. But for me, it just gives much more possibilities to not just frame yourself like that. Let’s say on the other side of the coin, yes, you are a practitioner that works with these phenomena, sound is your area of expertise, yes. But coming back to what we said, these phenomena, these mediums, these materials could be multiple things. So because of that it is probably not needed to define it as sound art per se. Because we also know that this art field, even if it is so young, is in a crisis. Because the execution of the work is always the same, there is no change, there is no involvement here. So it becomes endogamic, it becomes very problematic and there is a lack of self-critique also. BC: Yeah. Lack of self-critique and lack of self-determination; just falling into a certain kind of definition that is also Westernised in a way. But local, embedded listening approaches, embedded sonic experiences in an individual who is coming from a non-Western background is something I’m very curious about: whether there were other kinds of ruptures, rather than limiting the ears to the ruptures in the body of contemporary/European music. I would like to focus on the other kinds of ruptures that were localised in the Global South, beyond the Eurocentric field of sound practices, innovations and experiments. MV: Absolutely, yes. You make me think of the notion of the fetish— the totemic aspect of an object. The notion of divinity is something that can be very difficult to discuss in that context—when the object is divine. What I perceive in India is a quite elaborate approach to that. It can be a photograph, it can be a piece of wood, an animal, a piece of metal. And for me the beauty of that—the way I resonate between Mexico and India in this case was clear. So it’s syncretic; it’s a syncretic culture and this is something that here in Europe, is mostly forgotten. And this is also a very strong value. Coming back to the notion of a system, an interface. For me that is crucial—you see an interface and you cannot approach it because

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it is some kind of sacral element that opens other kinds of questions. It’s not about magic, it’s not that! That would be very difficult to define. But I would say it is a tool that serves as a medium to access certain areas. Once you access that, you have to also consider what happens when you amplify a signal. So then this becomes a way more complex, and that for me is probably a very strong difference between approaches like the Big South, Mexico, India, certain places in Asia. BC: Africa. MV: Africa, of course. I mean it’s a very different approach that is pretty much grounded in the notion of the fetish. This is something that seems irrelevant here. BC: The syncretism. MV: Yes. It’s fascinating, it’s beautiful. It requires something; it requires some experiences in life to be able to access that. And the normalisation of thought in the European context doesn’t allow this. So I don’t know exactly why; I don’t have the answer but it is not allowing this part. BC: True, absolutely. Also another aspect, which is the final question or final concern for me in this discussion, is the engagement with the audience—the way you engage. Audience engagement is an aspect in which West and East may have historically different approaches. For example, I have grown up in India seeing performances where the entire community is taking part. It’s not like a podium, or a stage where the audience is sitting with a frontal/consuming relation. The community is taking part in the production of sound together. This is something unique. MV: Hmm. BC: Don’t you think that? How do you like to engage with the audience? Is it through a consumptive mode of entertainment, or through sharing? What is your approach? MV: That’s a very interesting question. Most of the time I feel like a clown entertaining people. It’s hard to not see myself like that. But, I’m also a listener in that situation, so for me, one part that is crucial especially when exhibiting a solo work is that I’m in the middle with the audience. Basically, receiving some kind of signal that is similar to what they are receiving. But this is hierarchical. I mean, it’s not horizontal because basically I am amplified and the audience is not amplified. That’s a fundamental difference here.

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Nevertheless in terms of a listening experience, it could be something that is closer to a communal situation. The notion of the division between stage and audience, I think, offers a lot of problems. One—this is a purely pragmatic aspect—is monitoring, for example. So if you are on stage and you have a very good monitoring system, what you perceive as a performer is completely different from what is happening in the main room. There is no way. It’s a clear illusion. Basically, you as a performer have your own party, and what is happening in the room is something completely different. For me, that is the first renouncement. I cannot. I mean, I want to be at the party with others, not alone! I want to be with the people! But if we compare it to what you said about the festivity of an event, let’s say when the community plays and produces the event too, it resonates. These are things that I have experienced in Mexico for sure—festivity and celebrations, coming together, drinking, eating together. I’m not sure if I can translate this into the art field, to be honest. I mean, that is something else. It’s better that it is there, it’s better that it is just authentic because it happened there. If I try to translate this into this context, it will be completely distorted. So I think it is better to go and enjoy it there. Here it is probably a different set of rules. BC: Right. Do you like to incorporate some decolonial elements in your work if you are conscious about that? It could be something like not conforming to the European demand, but something where your individuality may emerge in resistance to indoctrination, identification, putting in boxes, all kinds of processes that non-Western artists feel in Europe. MV: Yes. But as we discussed before, this is not completely in our control I would say. I think the moment we have the opportunity to speak about this, we have to speak it loudly. And I really hope that. This is probably a very naive approach, I mean, people don’t ask me to exhibit my work, because I’m Mexican. But on the other side of the coin I know that for institutional support, for public funding, for all these kinds of things, it just works easier. So I think even if we talk about this, the white, European man has less possibility, has less options, and has a very difficult time. BC: Now. MV: Now. Definitely. Let’s say if you were born in a small town somewhere in Europe, it’s more difficult.

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But this is a very recent phenomenon. This is occurring in just the last two to three years, particularly after Black Lives Matter movement. MV: Yes, that’s precisely the point—how everything gets shifted. It’s not our fault, we didn’t vote for that, no. It’s like that; unfortunately, it is like this. So you have to be very smart to really have your position because if not, it’s really difficult. BC: Yeah. Anything you would like to add in this line of argument or stream of thoughts? MV: Hm. I think, coming back to what you asked in terms of how comfortable or how familiar you feel being named as a sound artist, or working in the field of sound art, I am trying now to approach it differently. It is not precisely about sound, but it is about Direct Media. Coming back to the notion of the haptic; it is something that is frontal that is not filtered. It’s direct. It is syncretic. Let’s say a syncretic element is something you really cannot define. These encounters with the otherness or the in-between-ness. I’m more and more really trying to probably inform myself towards that and also being exposed to certain situations that really enforce this condition. So what does directionality mean? What is this notion of frontality? Without being just loud, explicit or vulgar, for example. That would be a very cheesy and easy way to solve the problem. It’s not that, it is a little more elaborate than that, but that’s the intention. BC: Yeah. Great. Let’s talk further on this point if we have time later on, like in an ongoing conversation. We can meet on Saturday and have a more elaborate discussion if you have time. MV: Sure. We can meet day-after and have a drink or something like that.

CHAPTER 9

Luka Mukhavele

Luka Mukhavele is a Mozambican musician, educator, researcher and instrument builder. His preferred musical instrument is the nvoko, a large electric bass guitar-like instrument that he constructed, upon study of the traditional chinvokvoko, a Tsonga bowed single-string musical bow. He is also an expert builder of mbira nyunga nyunga, and has created an atelier to pass along his knowledge and craftsmanship to a younger generation of instrument builders. Mukhavele was a performer and speaker at the 2016 Bow Music Conference in Durban, South Africa, where he and Gregory Beyer met for the first time. This was an important meeting, as transcriptions and analyses of Mukhavele’s field recordings of xitende musical bow performer, Antonio Maquina, feature prominently in Beyer’s DMA thesis, ‘O Berimbau: A Project of Ethnomusicological Research, Musicological Analysis, and Creative Endeavor’. This conversation was recorded on Zoom upon prior appointment with Luka Mukhavele. I got to know about Mukhavele’s work and nvoko in the ‘Africa Synthesized: Electronic Music pre-MP3’ conference in 2020.1 It was a pleasure discussing his work methodology and general approach to sound and listening. Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Luka Mukhavele—LM   For more information, visit: https://aoinstitute.ac.za/ifpop/symposia/africasynthesized/. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_9

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BC: To begin with, I will ask you about your coming to work with sound and experimenting with sound, music, musical instruments—from the very beginning. LM: Okay. How I came to this approach of experimenting with sounds? Yeah. You know in my culture musical instruments are part of our toys as we grow; always. It’s not a part of our culture that parents buy toys for their kids; in our society, this is like a Western import in that regard. So we grew up and they would always encourage you and support you to develop your own toys and so on. This is how it was as I grew up; I grew up making my own things and depending on which materials you are using and how you are really putting them together—the sizes and proportions—you get from each object, from each instrument, a different sound and different timbre. I think this is what fascinated me. I started by building and playing instruments of the guitar family—some local guitars with tin oils and so on, but also traditional instruments like Xizambi (the bow you see behind me there), that’s a very common instrument in my home area, and they beat the bow also—called Xitende—and this one is a Xizambi.2 BC: Yeah. Is it a bow instrument? LM: Yeah, they are very common and I really got engaged with these instruments so much. Later on, I learnt to play guitar and I learnt a bit of piano informally. In the beginning, I was self-taught also because I already had this accessibility to harmony and progression—how you put the notes together to get a chord. I had empirically learnt, so when I got a guitar I really didn’t need a teacher as such; I started searching for sounds I already knew from the other instruments, and that is how I entered it. So this is how my whole journey became experimental. Later on, I taught myself also to play trumpet, flute, transposed flute and saxophone—and saxophone I played for quite a long time in jazz settings. But for me it was always experimental; I was never satisfied with established sounds, I always felt realised when I made something which sounded different. And this is how my journey with experimenting with sounds began. BC: You were in Mozambique at that time?

2

 Xitende is a traditional southern African braced-bow instrument with a gourd resonator.

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LM: I started in Mozambique, yes. And much later I went to South Africa. You know South Africa has a very strong/strongest music industry in the region, so I tried to penetrate that industry but it was not good timing because it was a time of a lot of violence between Inkatha and ANC, and this forced me to go back to Mozambique. I really had quite interesting projects but I realised my life was at risk in South Africa. Then I went back to Mozambique and later on I went to Zimbabwe to study ethnomusicology and get a lot more involved with Mbira, which I had sort of already experienced in my research in Mozambique, but in Zimbabwe I got to really sit at the desk and learn it.3 I had an interaction with Mbira masters because in the end I built a recording studio, and I had a lot of traditional musicians especially of Mbira recording in my studio; this was my intensive exposure to Mbira. So when I went back to Mozambique, I started this project to record Mbira repertoires because in Mozambique we lost a lot of this tradition; they were almost extinct in Mozambique. You would probably find in the whole country one or another Mbira player who is not even known in their village, you know. And so I started this project, and I really should say that Mbira is alive again in Mozambique, it’s a very big community. I think after the Zimbabwean community, the Mozambican community is the biggest Mbira community and that is also very much up to date with it. BC: Then you came to Europe later on, much later? LM: Much later. I came to Europe about three years ago. Yeah, what brought me to Europe is because I got offers to continue and finish up my doctoral research in Europe at the Transcultural Music Studies of the Franz Liszt University in Weimar. So yeah, I got the offer and the scholarship and then I said, ‘Yeah, I will take it’. BC: When you were growing up in Mozambique, experimenting with sounds, musical instruments (local, situated musical instruments like Mbira, Xitende), did you have a sense of canonical works in sound in your mind, namely an aural heritage or a sonic cultural grounding? LM: Yeah. Cultural grounding, but I did not express that clearly. Well, first it was in the family. An uncle of mine, who was the younger brother of my mother, used to play these bow instruments. Both 3

 Mbira are a family of traditional musical instruments of Zimbabwe similar to a finger harp.

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bows and he used to play guitar and harmonica. But you know, he was like a village kind of musician, he did not really make a living out of it but he had so much passion for it that even when other people went to the fields, he did not do his fields properly because he was so much into music. So yeah, he had a lot of influence on me; he used to play at all places but he also used to play in the village round. And then my older brother also learnt music—he studied in the seminary, he was the musician in the church, and also when he came home he brought some instruments sometimes to learn the music for the church—the catholic church—which the family was always very much attached to. But everyday life in the village—in school we had cultural activities, we had music groups, we had dance groups, there were handwork groups, and I was always in the music group of the school. BC: Any canonical figure, such as composers or performers that you were inspired by during growing-up years—during the formative years? LM: Yeah, I think quite early on I got influenced also by International music. I got quite early influenced by this, but it did not take me off my roots, that’s what I realised. It just blended in a way that it probably had an almost, I would still say some equal footing maybe, in quite a balanced proportion. So yeah, there were a lot of old men in the village like I said, who always played and this is what in traditional music so much inspired me. It is a seed actually which got planted, and when I look at whatever I am doing today, every second step that I take takes me back to those sources you know; it connects me to those sources. But at the same time when I let it fly, then it peaks from all these international influences like, of course, I have listened to jazz during some time, I have listened to rock music, and I have been very much inspired by maybe not exactly reggae music, but I have been very much inspired by the music of Peter Tosh for example. Very strongly inspired; I always found it seemed like it was really connected—it’s the connection that it has, it’s the African roots that it has. That’s how I felt it was; I did not feel it was music that came from across the continent; when I listened to it sounded like ‘oh this is like our music’! So it grew like that so naturally with me, so all of these established themselves as my canons. Of course, I also listened to African musicians like

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Manu Dibango, who played a lot of influence.4 When I started to play saxophone I also tried to follow those footsteps, but also I got influenced by jazz musicians—American jazz musicians like Coltrane. I always liked the music and tried it also. So yeah, that is how the canons built up. Many of them would also be unknown people; I actually sing about them each time I feel in a certain tune, in a certain song that I was influenced by those men. I really make a point—most of them are not alive anymore. But I have got a song called Makwapace, and this was the name of a traditional musician who played the Xitende and I had a lot of intensive interaction with him; not for a very long time, but quite intensive. So I remained with some tunes which he actually allowed me—he taught me to play tunes and later on they got my personality also. It is a mixture of his personality and my personality in those tunes, so I always mentioned him in those. So that is the kind of canons, yeah. BC: You said that you are dissatisfied with what was there, so you were looking for new sounds. Why was that; why were you looking for new sounds? LM: New sounds. When I talk of looking for new sounds it’s not really new sounds—not strictly new sounds for me—but looking to share new sounds, to bring out new sounds you know. Unknown sounds like these timbres from my musical culture; to bring them and share them with musicians from different musical cultures. That brings out a new sound and this is exactly what I am doing. I’ve been experiencing/feeling that the music is getting/scaling another height—it is growing. Let’s put it that way. It broadens, it gets a broader horizon, it becomes more appealing and it doesn’t sound as exotic as it would if it was just listened to from an old man in the village playing. These people you know, sometimes people push themselves into it to relate to it/to consume it. But when you really invite people from different cultures you see the contribution from each one of them and that’s what I mean by new sounds. BC: Right. Like putting new blood into the body. 4  Manu Dibango was an acclaimed Cameroonian saxophonist who covered a vast spectrum of styles, from traditional African roots music to jazz, soul, Afrobeat, reggae, gospel, French chanson, Congolese rumba, salsa and solo piano. He is widely considered to be a founding father of funk music.

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LM: Yeah! Yes, yes, that is how I view it. BC: What brought you to play so-called Western instruments such as saxophone or guitar, trumpet, piano? LM: First of all, they were new to me. These are not the instruments that I was exposed to, so they were new. I was eager and I was also fascinated. Like I said, I am not specifically fascinated by a style or genre of music, but it is a tune in a certain genre. It can be a rock tune, it can be hip-hop, a Mongolian throat singing tune, but it is something that just happens there and I feel. I try to not mediate it intellectually; I let it operate naturally and then later on I try to understand—‘Why did this have such an effect on me?’ and I try to build the lines. So yeah, I don’t know if I answered your question fully. BC: Yes. I was wondering about the inherent differences, not only in sonic cultures but also in the tuning systems. For example, Western instruments’ tuning systems are quite different from African instruments. The microtonal difference between tones, durationality and the sound itself are differently oriented. Did you find the difference interesting, or did you recognise this difference as a gulf that is difficult to bridge? LM: Yeah, I did recognise the difference because like I said, I had this formative seed beginning that was already planted in me. You know, like the temperament: the temperament that you are initiated in really sits deep in you and you use that to judge everything else. It is the referential temperament. But as time goes on and on and you become gradually more tolerant; you first accept and become more tolerant and you start to enjoy and live with it comfortably. That is what I feel happened. Of course, there are moments when I feel like exploring these non–Western equally tempered kinds of intervals. I think sometimes they bring in interesting blends and natural effects which are very common in self-made instruments because there you are really tuning naturally—you are tuning with your voices. If you let yourself tune it, you tune with your inner ear but if you put a chromatic tuner, it is something else. But still because of the rich spectrum of acoustic instruments and specially those Western sound producing devices that are so standardised, or refined… Let me say that I am against heavy refinement in music; I don’t like it because I think it kills the art. It kills the art. Of course, it is scientifically right to do so but it kills art. So

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these temperaments are very interesting. One of the things I discussed a lot in my thesis was really the fact that music academies worldwide are still relying very much on Western concepts. Like when they describe intervals: the moment we say it is a fourth, we say fourth because it is the fourth note in the sequence. But you find in other temperaments that that is not the fourth note and sometimes it is the seventh note because there are others in between. This is really killing because people think they are educating themselves, they are making themselves wiser in their understanding of the music but they are destroying it. Because whatever doesn’t fit within the Western standard, people put aside. Even scholars with high degrees who are expected to be critical thinkers in this subject, you still find them doing this and this is the thing I am always very much concerned about, and it is part of my discourse every time. BC: Yeah. It is the question of tuning it naturally; tuning it with all its imperfections, even. Nature also has imperfections. But technology, when it reproduces itself, it is not going to have imperfections. It is perfect, it is mathematically inclined. So this difference in approaches also in listening and instrument building is something that perhaps informs your discourse, right? Like how instruments and sounds can be more embedded in nature. LM: Yeah. I always recognise that whichever music, it is the spirit of the instrument; it is always embedded, and it is there in the instrument. What you do when you play an instrument is just to establish a connection between you and the instrument and you can trigger out/extract the musicality. That is how I always define and look at the potential of instruments. You know, talking of this universalisation of the Western concepts, I go as far as even replacing them with local ones—for me it works, I have proved that, but I need to put it across through collaborations with other people, musicians and scholars. We definitely have other progression possibilities— many, endless progression possibilities, and harmonic possibilities which are embedded in the different instruments. But unfortunately if you look at it, for example, Western popular music has such a strong influence that people will think 1/4/5. And it is becoming like this everywhere in the world. It is already a practice. People don’t think, and what doesn’t fit in 1/4/5—if an ­instrument cannot make you precisely a 1/4/5 in the Western way—they will

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tell you it is off-tune. They don’t want you. And this is what I am battling. In fact, that is a problem; that is a major concern. That is also a colonial ear through which music from other cultures is listened to. To find tuning systems made with a Western colonial ear. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Anything outside that tuning system is considered untuned. Exactly. It is exactly handled like that and we/our academies continue to replicate this coloniality of the system. Yeah, it is a very challenging situation now. How do you like to practice a sense of decoloniality in your work— in your instrument building, performance, and sound production practices? The way I exercise this: first of all I believe that this issue of coloniality is very difficult because it is not tangible. You cannot seize it; it is not a target that you can catch, put it standing somewhere and shoot it (Laughs). If you think you want to shoot it, you are going to shoot a lot of people! So it doesn’t work this way. So one way, I think, is to strengthen ourselves and to show our strengths and explore—not only to show, but to explore; to show by exploring/by using them. For me, this is happening when I really take these instruments. I have given one of each to two groups/bands that I work with—they are both students, but in different settings. I really use my instruments. I make them understand that when I am playing these instruments—the Mbira, the Xizambi, the Xitende—it is the leading instrument. It is not a subaltern instrument; it is leading. So everything else has to find ways to make a dialogue with this and not force it to change itself. This is what I think is the best way to fight this big monster of coloniality that is so much scattered and implanted in the minds of the people. Yeah. Do you think that instead of creating a binary between East and West, Global North and Global South, it is possible to have a kind of blending between two worlds—a confluence of sorts? Yeah, it’s possible to blend also. You always find that the moment you start to make the music, if you really explain the concept (because I think everything starts from understanding the concept and consenting—some people may understand and not consent and not be willing to adhere to it). So if people understand and like and consent to it, then you will easily find common ground

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between the two sides. And if this is not happening: I have many times experienced that I am working with people who are not really so much prepared to enter this negotiable area, this grey area, this blending, and it becomes difficult. It just naturally doesn’t work and after some time you start losing interest in inviting this person to your session and suddenly you find people who actually invite themselves. They see and they invite themselves—‘oh, I would like to have the…’. At the moment the group of students I am working with, most of them invited themselves after the lectures and a few sessions. And it works very fine like that. BC: Is this blending also working in your instrument building? You are using technology to build new instruments like Nvoko, Mbvoko which is an electrical reinterpretation of a traditional instrument. LM: The blending is working fine; I like it. For example, I use tuning pegs for my bass guitar and sometimes I can use strings for bass guitar, or I can use gut strings. Also, I have experimented (maybe you have not seen this) with so-to-say non-musical strings. I think probably sometimes the industry makes us think that their products are the only ones that work for what we want to do. So, I built this bass/contrabass instrument in Mozambique which I called Ndhondhoza. ‘kuNdhondhoza means to produce a deep voice. I actually used ropes! I used ropes, and I performed it on stage and the sound was really rich—I liked it. There is a song where I begin on this Ndhondhoza and later on, the song is handed over to an electric bass because I shift instruments. For me, at that phase— that was exactly for assessing the sonority and musicality of the Ndhondhoza—I feel the drop of the spectrum, of the energy, of the spirit of the song. From the moment I stop playing that and the electric bass comes in, you can feel that it is synthetic, kind of unnatural and metallic—that the sound lost something there. Of course, you blend it in with other instruments. This is the kind of thing; that is how I experiment with things on stages, in compositions and in arrangements. BC: What is your relationship to technology? You use technology to reinterpret instruments and make hybrid instruments. How can you explain your relationship to technology—which is often a Western invention? LM: I have been studying technology a lot, I should say that. Part of my research is also in technology—in building machines that for me

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transcend the mere technology which is involved in instruments, but to also encompass technology to build the instruments themselves. Like I had to recently build an electric hammer for hammering the metal to make the keys. In my instruments I had always introduced pickup systems; I have experimented with various of them and later on, I realised that it was important to also implement pre-amplification—you know those pre-amplifiers like you find on guitars connected to Piezos. So I experimented with a variety of them. I read quite a lot about technology and explored it and I take it at that level. I believe that technology does not have nationality. BC: Yes, sure. Maybe you can hack into technology and reinterpret it, make it your own—reclaim the Western technologies. Technologies were not just Western, technology existed long before European colonisers came to Africa, for example, human-built technologies and tools from natural resources in the villages. LM: Yes! The construction of a Mbira is high technology! If you look, for example, our people tuned this. I mean it is said that the Mbira, or rather, the lamellophone has existed for over 3000 years and of all our lamelophones Mbira is one type of them. But if you realise, people were very aware, for example, of the chorus effect that results from slightly tuned apart notes, you know—it creates that undulation/chorus effect. If you realise, in the Western concept, you really need to have those pedals to produce such an effect. If you realise the buzzers—you know, lately people use pieces of metal; traditionally people used snail shells and seashells to rattle. I mean these are the kinds of things that when we put together with that chorus, you hear some sort of distortion from the instrument. For me, it is high technology. Of course, like I say, in the case of Mozambique and many other countries, this has been forced to stop by different strategies—ideological and even material and so on. There were actually legislations forbidding local people to practice certain activities, and these activities mainly involved metal—like iron smelting, you know. People were prohibited; people were supposed to just do farming and farm the products that the colonisers needed to take to their countries and so on. So for me, it is high time—it should have been 50 years ago—we start to retrieve these technologies and take further steps with it and use whatever information/knowledge you have today from whichever

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source. It is ours. The moment you have it, it’s ours—we can use it. Of course, there are those items that have intellectual property and so on, but it is not technology—not always—that has those restrictions. BC: Yeah, absolutely. To reclaim technology with a kind of non-­ hierarchical, decolonial approach. There are pre-colonial, pre-­ modern technologies that existed, which were erased through Western colonial domination of power. LM: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. BC: Another question I was having was about identity; for example, the universalisation of Western canon. Western canon is a Western canon, but it claims to be universal which is why a sense of aggression/imperialism comes from this idea of universalism. But do you think of yourself as someone identified as African or Mozambique-­an, a musician and sound artist? Or do you like to gain a universal and global identity? What is the tension between these different kinds of identities—particularly when you came to Europe to do your PhD? I came from India to do my master’s and PhD in Europe. So the different identities, clash of identities and conflict of identity— how do you deal with that? LM: Yeah. For me, I could do my PhD from anywhere. Let’s put it that way. Actually, my work does not take a lot from what Europe has as its own culture. We talk of technology as universal. I mean, studying here in Europe, I did some heavy/intensive research study in acoustics—acoustics and organology. Suddenly I realised something about lots of principles: when people tell you of a Helmholtz resonator, for example, this principle was already applied in Africa for thousands of years in the Xylophones. Here it is from the eighteenth century I think; I can’t recall exactly. So, for me, this simply helps me trigger/to see what I could not probably see. My study also is purely inspired or triggered by the problems that I identified in Africa, and a solution you can find anywhere. If it doesn’t work, just leave it aside; forget it and look for one that works. So when I came to Europe I found some solutions and at times I got triggered to find solutions in my own culture and setting. For other things, I didn’t find solutions. For example, I cite a lot of local knowledge systems and traditional references which are unknown to science. This challenged my work because there are all those formalities that sometimes it actually delayed my work a lot.

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People said, ‘No, you are not citing this and that’, and I said, ‘I do not just want to write the name of someone just to make everybody know that I have read or I know about this person’. I don’t even know them, I know about them. As if whatever I am saying here I learnt from them. I didn’t. I learnt it from experience; I learnt it from an old man in the village or from contacts. So I shouldn’t be forced to cite whoever. It is the case of Helmholtz: many people when you want to talk of the resonators on the xylophones, they tell you the principle of the Helmholtz resonator and I say, ‘No, for me that is something else but this is not because of that’. People knew it. I would rather find a person, but I cannot because it is not recorded. But you can attribute it to the people and the communities where this technology is known to have developed. Yeah. That is one way to take out this colonial mentality for me. When I say it is difficult, you cannot seize and grab it, put it at a point and shoot it, but you can challenge it in different ways that neutralise it. BC: In fact, it is a wonderful exercise that you are doing—to cite local knowledge. That is what science is! If we think about science, you cite or make cross-references from the sources from which we derive knowledge. We derive knowledge from our experiences, so why should we need to only cite Western scholars? LM: Yeah. Yeah. It is a problem that I am actually still discussing a lot with colleagues at the university in Maputo. For example, when people talk, they are concerned with the ‘classics’—they tell you only about the canons and the ‘classics’. First of all, they will tell you ‘classical music’ you know, and I say, ‘Whatever your Beethoven-s and so on, this is Western classical’. We do have our classical music also! It is different! We should find ways to get our classical music to the academy also and to all those very important events of our society. Yeah, when I think back, I remember those times, but it has been gradually changing; it has been criticised. Even when I was younger I remember the times when for the funeral of important/influential people in society (okay, let us say politicians—those were the figures!), they used to play Western music sometimes—those ballads. But fortunately this has fallen aside; it has remained behind. Still there are challenges. I always look at the fact that still in Africa we are building our nations with a musical identity from the Western. National anthems of African

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nations, if you look at them, all of them are almost invariably derived from Western hymns or a combination of different hymns. They will tell you that they are composing, and even make those bids/contests inviting people to compose the national anthems and so on, and that’s all they do. Yeah, this cannot! BC: Another Western technology I would say is recording. Recording came to Africa around 1902–1903. At the same time, it was deployed across the globe by Gramophone Company kind of companies—colonial companies who wanted to map sound and music practices in the Global South in order to access and control. Do you think that recording was limiting the scope of music performance at that time? LM: Well, the fact that a recorded piece of work is frozen, you could see it from one perspective as limiting. In fact, in a lot of recordings— well, I have worked a lot in that industry also! Even before I was operating it, I have been there as a musician. There is already music production associated with it which means they already have some presets of how you should do it. In that sense, yes, it is limiting the freedom of the artist; I feel that it is limiting. On the other hand, it is a good contribution in that it makes material accessible that would otherwise not be heard again—it would just have gone like time, you know, it would be just like time and the minute it is gone you will never have it again; it is gone. So a lot of music would just be like that, and this even helped me a lot to listen to various recordings done in Africa by researchers like Hugh Tracey, and by the Gallo Company of South Africa. This helped me a lot to really have information, have music that happened in the past and hear how it happened although, of course, it has been influenced, like I said, by the recording process itself. But there is still something that can be useful, so it has those two sides for me—it has those two polarities. There is a side where you say, ‘Yeah, it is worth doing’, but don’t be a slave of it. That is what I would say; you should rationalise it, and criticise it and use it in that way. BC: Perhaps local performers like traditional musicians never thought of recording their voice. They thought of sound as ephemeral, which is like air, bird calls and wind—a natural phenomenon. Do you think birds need their voices recorded? LM: Naturally I do agree that traditional musicians think of their music as ephemeral because they discuss ongoing issues. Each time even

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in terms of lyrics you see that they sing about what is happening in that moment around them and so when that has passed, something else comes and they update themselves. BC: It is like a river; it is an alive river which is flowing continuously. LM: Yeah. The water that you touch in that moment is gone and I don’t see the chance that you will be able to touch it again or even recognise it. That is how it probably opens space for you to create new things because if we always listen to what we did, our tendency is to reproduce it. If we don’t hear it again, we would recreate it and it would be something new each time. So in that sense you could say, yeah it is limiting; it is holding you back. BC: Do you think critically in your work about these kinds of phenomena that are limiting or colonially objectifying listening or putting sounds into fixed boxes? LM: Can you repeat that question? BC: Yes, I was wondering whether this kind of colonial model of understanding sound, putting in a particular identification, putting it inside the box called ‘tradition’—tradition which is fixed—is problematic for you and do you resist this kind of colonial mindset to undermine sounds from top down? LM: Yeah. It is problematic because it has its pros and cons in my understanding. I don’t know if I would just call it colonial because I know also that from the communities, sometimes you have conservative people who always think that you should not change, you should freeze or whatever. I always say if you want to freeze they say I should not introduce any change to the instrument/to the music. Do you think from day one that this music was created when the instrument was invented, it looked like the way you know it today?’ Obviously it can’t. But, of course, colonialism took and used that thing for a different purpose which was the purpose to just keep the people as sources, to first of all highlight/delineate this inequality/hierarchy, you know. So this has been very much instrumental for that purpose. Until today, people—even educated people—have this sense of hierarchy when it comes to the idea that Western music is higher than traditional musics. So, this is reflected in many things that people do—the way they think, perceive the world and act first. Second is the fact that the moment you remain in that stage, it means—if I am standing here, I am not moving

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forward, I will be holding everything with me: you are holding technology, you are holding philosophies, political views, you are holding everything to a specific time and space which I think is detrimental. Of course, colonialism knew how to use this but even went further to erase it. Like I said, the villages were forbidden from the practice of local musics even in the people’s own settings. But then also Christianity came with this concept that introduced that it is evil, local musics are connected to demons and bad spirits and practices, and all of these things have obviously negatively impacted the evolution of local musics. BC: Another question—the last question almost—I was thinking to ask you about performance. You perform also in Europe and you have a long history of documentation of different kinds of music. Now, I was wondering whether you see the difference between the Western ways of performing or performing in the African context, because in the Western setting there is a stage, there is a distance between the audience and the performer and there is a hierarchy— it is a podium. But situated African context is essentially more community-­ based sounds, where everybody—the listener and musician—is on the same level. How do you like to perform your work and your instruments? LM: I think I learnt to adjust to the performance context/setup through time. I always grew into it—I grew into it and grew with it. The performance context should sort of shape the performance and sometimes it even ends up shaping your repertoire but also the style even within your repertoire and how you perform each one of the tunes. So that’s what I mean sometimes, that my generation already grew up, in a way, with two cultures: one which is an original/natural culture and one which has been imposed. But it is there; we cannot deny it. I grew up mostly speaking my mother tongue Shangani from Mozambique but I also learnt Portuguese at a young age, you know. In school it was Portuguese; school was never done in my mother tongue. There are people of my generation whose families did not speak African languages; they got so brainwashed that they did not teach their children their local languages, they only taught them Portuguese. So I should say that in a way I am lucky; I still had the chance to strongly command—I can say I strongly command, I became a teacher of my mother tongue later on with further studies. So I am one of the few to

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actually command that language; there are not many in that level. It is the same when you talk of the stage: if I am in an environment—family environment—where everybody understands my mother tongue and it’s my extended family, I will speak in my mother tongue; I enjoy that. It even sounds unnatural for me to speak in Portuguese in that environment but there are also very often varying environments where there is someone or a few people who do not understand the local language and are compromised. It is like that with music also—stage performance. BC: Do you like to engage with the audience like a co-listener, or on the contrary, as someone who is consuming through a mode of entertainment? How do you engage your audience? LM: The way I engage the audience: I really like to invite my audience to be with me; to be together. It is more challenging here in Europe; it is more difficult. First of all, they don’t identify themselves/they don’t find themselves in the roots of the music. But then like I say, when you let in elements—I just let in elements, I am not forcing them. Like I said I also grew up with this binary kind of setup; I listened a lot to Western music as much as I listened to traditional(maybe more to traditional and this pop/commercial which is in-between; you cannot tell exactly whether it is Western because it is played on guitar but it is a traditional instrument melody which has been adapted for guitar—for equal temperaments). You feel that yeah, it is there, but it is the way it is. It is a piece of art of its own kind. So yeah. When I perform at home, for me it is always a part of my performance to explain the history of the music, to tell the history of the instrument/music and so on. This is one way for me to invite people to be part of the performance. BC: And these two worlds—how do you like to make them meet you? How do you like to make them coexist in your own work, in your own body, and in your own discourse? LM: Yeah. In my discourse, I think I just let them flow; I try not to force them. I let them flow as naturally as possible. One of the things for example that I feel in that regard as challenging me is that a lot of the lyrics of my songs when I sing, are sort of consciousness in lyrics, for example. It is really that these lyrics are mostly dedicated and directed to African people, most of them say, ‘Yeah, Africa wake up, Africa unite’ and that kind of thing or to

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bring the musical elements that reveal our common platform as a way to fight this divide and rule that people think. For example, we are in the process of registering Mbira for intangible cultural heritage, which is another issue on its own, and people still were talking things like—‘Oh, but this one is from Zimbabwe’. I am like—‘You know what, when these instruments were invented, there was no Mozambique, no Zimbabwe; there were just people living here!’ These people, if you find them today, you will realise that the borders came and cut them in the middle, and one was residing in what is today called Mozambique and one in Zimbabwe, Tanzania and so on and they started to grow within; to grow inwards there, you know. Those borders started to become more realistic and more and more strong such that people who speak the same language on either side still highlight the fact that they come from this or that country. They speak the same language, sometimes they have the same family name and it is the same people! Yeah, so you have that challenge also. BC: Yeah. This bordering, demarcation, and quantification of land, is it colonial violence and damage? LM: Of course! Of course, it is very colonial. That is very reminiscent, a very strong element of colonialism that still remains. When we want to discuss a culture that existed for 3000 years, we make references to countries that were relatively born yesterday. And they were imposed. I mean, if it was something that the people themselves created, you know, maybe there would not have been borders or these limitations, but maybe as a giving—you take care of this, I will take care of that. But now it is like—‘Hey, this is mine, that is yours, stay here’. This is how it has been made, you know. You stay there and I stay here. What makes it worse for countries like Mozambique for example, is that the colonial language is different from all the neighbouring countries; Mozambique doesn’t share the colonial language. You feel more the pinch that the people who don’t learn English in Mozambique, they can communicate with the community that speaks the same (language) when they go across but Mozambique is a long country and it is not everyone who has this border language, you know—this language cut at the border. There are some which are only in Mozambique or only in Tanzania or only elsewhere, so yeah. It is really very limiting; it is crippling. This is one of the aspects of colonialism

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where you are like how do I deal with this? To deal with this is for me, to show the potential ties that we always had and that we still have—they are still there. If you can remember them, if you can track them, it means they are still there but we need to strengthen them and erase the borders gradually. But this has a lot of opposition. BC: Perhaps sound can become one of the socially connecting forces— joining different segments, borders to a unified common, like an acoustic common. LM: Contemporary Europe has already done this. I mean, the European Union in a way functions something like that, but we are still following what they implanted in the colonial times; what they imposed on our countries. It is difficult in the moment really, to break, and collapse these borders in the minds of the people. BC: Okay. It was such a great pleasure, such a wonderful and illuminating conversation that we had. Would you like to add something regarding these subjects that we are discussing? LM: I think we have spoken it all. Maybe in the future something might open up, but at the moment, we have talked quite a lot about it. If something may have remained it is probably not of much relevance as such at the moment.

CHAPTER 10

Khyam Allami

Khyam Allami (born in Damascus in 1981) is an Iraqi-British multi-­ instrumentalist musician, composer, researcher and founder of Nawa Recordings. Primarily a performer of the Oud, his artistic research focuses on the development of contemporary and experimental repertoire based on the fundamentals of Arabic music, with a focus on tuning and microtonality. He holds a BA and Master’s in Ethnomusicology from SOAS, University of London and is currently completing an M4C/AHRC funded PhD in composition at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University. Khyam Allami, Sharif Sehnaoui and I had an impassioned discussion around the issues of Global South and decoloniality during the Irtijal Festival 2019 on the rooftop of a festival venue Onomatopoeia in Beirut. That discussion is mentioned in the conversation with the festival director Sharif Sehnaoui in this book. To follow up and continue the exchange on these subjects, in 2020, I asked Allami for a more structured conversation and register it. We met on Zoom, but the connection was quite disturbed, so we decided to record the conversation outside of Zoom, on an audio recorder at Allami’s end. In

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Khyam Allami—KA. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_10

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2021, I invited Allami to contribute to The Listening Biennial1 where we also performed together.2 BC: To begin with, I would like to ask you about your coming to work with sound and experimental music. I read in different places that you started playing Oud in your childhood and then left it for rock music and were part of a number of bands when you moved to the UK and then in 2003 you started to pick up the Oud again. Can you give me a little background of this trajectory in your own words? KA: Yeah, actually I didn’t start playing Oud when I was young. I started playing the violin when I was in Damascus aged eight or so, then I tried to take up the Oud later on in London at the age of 20 or so and it didn’t really work out. The teacher I was studying with wasn’t very inspiring so I just left it. That was after I had started playing guitar, bass guitar and drums. I think it was just a natural continuation; there was a love for music and a desire to participate in something creative. In my school, I was very lucky that they had good music programmes. I was having music lessons at school where I was learning to play the piano or to play bass guitar and guitar. I was also playing violin in the school orchestra but punk rock and rock music have a certain appeal when you are young. The rebellious nature of it was very inspiring. I was into that, but once the USA/UK led invasion of Iraq happened in 2003, it made me feel like I was out of balance. I must have been around 22 and all of a sudden Iraq was in my face again in a very difficult and complex way and lots of people were asking me ‘What’s going on? How’s your family?’ I really had nothing to say because I was so disconnected from that cultural reality. I’ve never been to Iraq; I was born outside and I’ve lived outside my whole life and I haven’t even visited. That sense of being out of balance and out of touch with my own heritage inspired me and pushed a deeper interest in reconnecting with that culture. Once I rediscovered the Oud again, I found a really great Iraqi teacher named Ehsan Emam who lives in London. It just made sense that a lot of different things that I was interested in started to tie together. 1  Kurda organized the Kurdish site of the Biennial that I co-curated: https://listeningbiennial.net/sites. 2  See: https://listeningbiennial.net/program.

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BC: When you started to explore the Oud for the second time or after 2003, were you already in the UK? KA: Yes. BC: And you were performing, for example, at BBC Proms? KA: Yes, I performed once there; that was 2010, I think.3 BC: At that time, were you aware of the theme you would call ‘white racial frame of music’ referring to the musical practices in the West. KA: Not in a very clear way. I’d had these frustrations. A natural consequence of being into rock music and playing in bands was that I got into recording. I went to college when I was 16 or 17 to study music technology which was basically programming using Cubase, sampling with Hardware Samplers, learning recording techniques and these kinds of things. I got very much into midi and programming drums, etc. After I started playing Oud, I noticed that any kind of musical ideas that I wanted to programme never sounded quite right coming out of the playback system of the computer, whether it was Cubase, Sibelius or anything like that. I was just trying to programme melodies that were in my mind—not complex Arabic melodies with very particular intervals—but they didn’t feel right and I never could quite understand it. Then slowly as I started to read more about Arabic music and theory, in an attempt to find some more details, I ended up realising that all this is an issue to do with tuning and temperament and this was not possible using these tools. Out of frustration I put all that digital desire aside and focused my energies on the Oud and on acoustic performance and solo performance. I felt that there was this problem but I couldn’t find a way to articulate it and get around it because all of the tools that were available at the time were incredibly complex and uninspiring as most of them still are today. BC: When you were growing up (I think you moved to the UK around the age of 9), you were learning music and violin in Damascus. Did you have any canonical idea of music and sound in the Middle East? We can use the word ‘tradition’—although it is a loaded and debatable word I am still using it. KA: Well, the funny thing is that the first melody that I learned to play on the violin was the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. 3  See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/events/performers/a2d6c3ee-10e0-4bd9-b5fef5bd196e9911/performances.

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BC: Okay (laughs). KA: At the time it was very exciting for me because I was learning to play a new instrument and I could play this melody and a few people around me—my teacher and my parents—were happy about it. But at home, my parents were listening to and singing Arabic songs all the time. They used to have very regular gatherings at home with friends with dinner and drinks and everybody would start singing. My father has a wonderful voice; he’s an excellent singer, and my mother has a very nice voice too. They used to sing all kinds of songs—Lebanese songs, Egyptian songs, a lot of Iraqi songs as well. But that was something that was never present within my musical studies. So in the violin lessons, I was taking in Damascus, I was basically learning Western music. When we moved to the UK, I remember being around ten years old and my mother took me to one of these second-hand markets (they call them car boot sales in the UK) and we bought an electric organ—the kind that has very noisy fans. You have to turn it on, let it warm up and then when you play you hear the sound of the electric fan pulsing wind through the thing. At the time, they were listening to a lot of Umm Kulthum at home, and I remember figuring out how to play a melody from an Umm Kulthūm song by ear. It was in a Maqām called Nahāwand that uses similar intervals to a Western minor mode.4 I taught myself this little melody on the Organ and I was very pleased and my parents were very happy but that’s as far as it went. There was never really any encouragement to get into Arabic music, to develop those particular skills, or to learn those Maqāms or anything like that. BC: Okay. So it was post 2003 that you got into practising Maqām and learning the intricacies of microtonal elements in Arabic music? KA: Absolutely. And the credit has to go to my teacher Ehsan Emam. He noticed when I started learning with him that I was very enthusiastic, that I had a talent for music, that I was dedicated, and he said to me—‘Khyam, in order for us to do this properly, we have to retune your ears and you’re going to have to spend a lot of time just listening’. I would say that 80 to 85% of my lessons with him 4  Maqām isa set of pitches and quintessential melodic elements, or motifs, and a traditional pattern of musical use. Maqām is the principal melodic concept in Middle Eastern musical thought and practices.

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throughout the first year were literally me sitting and listening to him playing/improvising the whole time. I was quite a difficult student because I would sometimes be getting bored or nodding off in the classes, but at the same time, I had a lot of interest. Ehsan was very patient with me. He could see me nodding off in the class and he would make me espressos to encourage me to stay focused; he never gave up on me. He never said to me—‘Oh you’re not interested, you’re falling asleep in the class, go home’. He would just keep going and that was huge to me. He could have asked me to listen to recordings at home every day, but he didn’t. He was insistent on my listening to him playing these extended improvisations sometimes for 30–40 minutes non-stop. That was really crucial and his insistence on that I think made a huge difference. BC: Yes, why do you think that he insisted you to listen to him performing in a corporeal setting rather than having a recorded version of that particular performance? Do you have any explanation? KA: I think one part of it is to do with his knowledge and his ability to navigate all the different complexities of the Maqām system. The Maqām system is not based on long-form expositions of one Maqām; even though he did do that a lot that’s an outlier approach. The Maqām system generally is based on navigating the tetra chordal web/network and how they all meet and interact together. This process of modulation is called intiqālāt in Arabic. Tanaqqol means to move from one place to another, so intiqālāt is literally moving from one tetrachord to another. It was easier for him to navigate them, take me through very well-known routes of modulations or to do very unexpected things and that used to depend on his mood or my reaction to certain things. Sometimes a certain Maqām or tetrachord would get me more excited than others so he would focus on them a little bit more and then introduce ideas such as Maqām Rast which is generally associated with being light, hopeful and open but there’s no reason why you can’t render Maqām Rast in a way that has more melancholy. This is what he would express that to me. So what he was doing, I think, was giving me a much deeper insight than the recordings ever could because recordings are mostly based on songs or a specific kind of text and its compositional path. In order to actually understand the depth of this musical world, I probably would have had to listen to thousands and thousands of recordings and it would have been too

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abstract because there’s no way to interact with the recordings. Whereas with him doing it face-to-face, he could react to me, I could react to him, and he could navigate things depending on his mood. I think pedagogically it was a much easier way to get those ideas across and help me re-tune my ears to all these different possibilities. BC: Yes, I am very curious to know about it because one of the main arguments in this project is about the intervention of recording in sound practice as a Western modernist tool of quantification/ objectification as well as a mode of plunder and how it impacted music making and sound production in the Global South. Friedrich Kittler argues about how the Western modernist inventions like recording (on Gramophone) disrupted the emergent sonic modes and structures of the traditional sound practices. Do you find that this argument is valid when it comes to listening to music not through a recording, on a fixed media like a CD but by being there in the physical, corporeal presence of the musician or performer? KA: Absolutely. There are two parts to this: one part for me was actually recording the classes themselves. So my teacher Ehsan was never very insistent about recording the classes. He wanted me to be present in the moment and be focused because when you record something, immediately you have this feeling in the back of your mind that you don’t need to focus because you have a recording that can be listened to later. But the reality is that you don’t absorb the material in the same way because there’s a part of you that is not invested in that moment and in being present because you know that there is a recording happening that you are going to be able to go back to it in the future. That said there were some moments in our classes when recording was incredibly important for me particularly when he was dealing with Iraqi Maqāms. In Iraq, there are these rural vocal styles called aṭwār and he would play these for me instrumentally on the Oud, which in itself was quite a radical thing because that doesn’t really have a tradition of happening. These are vocal genres and he was a great singer so he used to sing them to me as well. But he used to play these musical forms instrumentally and having the opportunity to record those moments was incredibly valuable because they didn’t exist as recordings by other artists that I could refer to. His encouragement of me recording the classes was always dependent on the content and I found this to be

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incredibly powerful because it really helped me be more engaged and present. My presence and the intent that I would be able to put out into the room/space and into the connection between me and my teacher was far more powerful than recording something for later. So what I used to do was record certain moments of the lesson just to have a little reference; sometimes it was an exercise, at other times it was a specific kind of melodic development or melodic idea. I would record and capture these little moments, but generally, it was all about being present. So he did encourage me to listen to recordings, commercial recordings of Umm Kulthūm, ‘Abdel Wahāb, etc., but he would never highlight particular songs. He would never say, ‘Go home and listen to this particular song and this particular melody’; he would just say, for example, ‘This week try to focus on Maqām Rast, find any songs that you can in Maqām Rāst and use your knowledge to discover’. Arabic music archiving is very measly and it was very difficult to find a database in which I could search for songs that use Maqām Rāst then go through those recordings and listen to them. I would have to search through random recordings and find that particular Maqām by ear. This again was a process of intent and active listening and active participation. I’m just going to carry on with another anecdote: I started studying Oud in 2004. In 2006, I enrolled myself in the ethnomusicology BA programme at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London because I wanted to study music but I didn’t want to study classical music or Jazz. I didn’t want to study how to become a session drummer you know, I wanted to study music from around the world and that was the only programme that was around. As part of my studies in the first year, I studied Gamelan and North Indian Tabla, which I carried on studying in the second year. I studied with a teacher called Sanju Sahai ji from Varanasi and he was a proponent of the Benaras Gharana.5 Studying with Sanju Sahai ji was a really mind-opening experience because firstly, there was a method of vocalising and therefore internalising the rhythmic compositions and patterns. He used to encourage me to write them down using Latin script. So if it was—dha tirakita dha, I would write ‘dha 5  Benaras Gharana is a school of musical style that is influenced by the folk tradition of North India (Benaras and adjoining areas) and is Khayal oriented. The Benaras tabla gharana is known for its powerful sound.

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tirakita dha’.6 I was recording by using pen and paper, and that was again also a reference. He encouraged that more than recording. He was encouraging me to learn the paltas or the kaidas from him directly but also to write them down so that I could reference them on paper in order not to get the complex rhythmic transformations wrong. By learning them verbally and then also writing them down, you actually internalised so much better than you would have by recording something and then listening back to that recording over and over again. I found that to be incredibly powerful because you had to be engaged, you had to be active and present in order to learn something verbally and then write it down using your own hand. He was always very discouraging of using mobile phones or laptops to write things. He wanted us to do it by hand using pencil. I had long public transport journeys in London while going to and from the university so I used to sit with my little notepad and read through the kaidas and paltas, reciting them by heart in silence while counting on my fingers. Even Ehsan encouraged me to do the same with the fingering exercises for the Oud. He would say, ‘Get your left hand, put it on your right forearm and practice fingering on your forearm. When you’re sitting in class, when you’re waiting in a queue, when you’re on the underground/metro or on your way home, practice your fingering by using your body. You don’t need your instrument’. Ehsan never really encouraged me to learn how to sing even though I think that would have been much more powerful—I really regret not doing that more with him. But with Sanju ji, learning to recite all of the Tabla compositions was incredibly beautiful to me; it was so liberating. Standing around in university, during breaks reciting kaidas and paltas was just so much fun and it had me actively engaged in the whole thing. But, going back to your question, I also used to record Sanju ji playing compositions and their variations as a reference so that I would not mess up the timings and I would learn how to be able to replicate the proper sound production because the Tabla is such a delicate and versatile instrument. It was important for me to have a recording of the sound production in order to know what to aim for. BC: Yes, those recordings were perhaps traces of the references and not the real thing. 6

 This is a rhythm pattern on tabla expressed in onomatopoeic ways.

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KA: Exactly. BC: They were just for coming back to/to refer to. It is like the way you memorise for a reference and then go back to the actual thing— that is the performance and performativity in actual presence. KA: Exactly. The recordings from my Oud classes would generally be references that could be used to get you back in that moment. You know how powerful recording audio is to the memory. I guarantee you that if I pull out those recordings now from my old hard drive and play them, I will remember exactly where we were sitting, which apartment we were in (because my teacher used to move around a lot), what was going on that day, what we ate during that class—all of that will come back. All it takes is a few seconds of that recording. Those moments were always so powerful for me because if I had recorded something, I would go back home, press play and I would be back in that moment which was already a lived experience that I had actively engaged with. I wasn’t passive or just recording it and waiting to listen to it when I got back home. I was active at that moment and so by pressing play, it would take listening to just 5, 10 or 30 seconds, of a recording to take me back in that place; the modality and the intonation would also be back in my mind. I would then turn off the recording, pick up my Oud and get into practice. The same thing would happen to me with the recordings of Sanju ji playing: when I played the composition I could hear the feeling, I could hear the groove, I could hear the sound production. I would then press stop and sit down and practice. BC: Yeah. I have a major problem, along with some of the sound scholars, with the recording technology’s intervention into non-Western sounds. Around the early part of the nineteenth century, recording technology was employed to capture and quantify non-Western musical and sonic practices. For example in India, in the Middle East and in Africa, representatives from colonial music companies such as Gramophone were sent to record these sounds which were not meant to be limited within 2.5 minutes of disc space. The hegemonic intentions were firmly grounded on making profit from sound sale. KA: Absolutely. BC: These sonic practices were atemporal documents in their own right. They had, for example, 5–6 hours of performances. Squeezing

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them down into two or three minutes of recording was damaging for the musical integrity. KA: Absolutely, they even influenced a new style of songwriting in the Arab world; short songs were never really a practice. I mean you had short folk songs, for example, but the majority of the performance practice was improvised or long form. This is called awasla and is a form of interconnected segments which have muwashshaḥa ̄t—the Arab Andalusian compositions and improvisations.7 You would have all kinds of different content. Once the recorded medium—particularly the 78 and 45  rpm records— became prominent and artists were able to earn money from them, songwriters and composers started to create short pieces that would fit into those three to six minutes per side. This directly influenced music making. The whole idea of pop songs being three minutes long comes from there. This is not only a Western phenomenon; it absolutely impacted non-Western music. That said, with regard to a tradition like the raga tradition in India, I remember talking to some teachers during a workshop and even to Sanju Ji during our Tabla classes, and he would say that as impossible as it is to actually reduce a raag performance down to six minutes, when you listen to recordings of those master musicians you can actually hear that they managed to condense all the musical characteristics into that sample. It’s very condensed and not purified, but more like a coalesced condensation of their knowledge of that particular raag. And so, as a student, you could spend a lifetime just studying those six minutes and you could continue to pull information out of it. However, that takes an incredible amount of dedication and knowledge. Even today if I listen to some of the recordings by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan or the Sarangi player—what’s the name of the wonderful Sarangi player? BC: Imrat Khan? KA: No. There are some really early recordings of an incredible Sarangi player. I’m sorry I can’t remember his name at all. What I’m trying to say is that there were certain byproducts of forcing musicians to condense all of their knowledge of one particular musical moment into these three or six minutes. Ah yes, Bundu Khan was the Sarangi player! But actually, for students or members of the public 7

 Muwashshaḥāt refers to the Arabic poetic form and a secular musical genre.

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to benefit from that condensed material it would take so much effort that in a way it’s pointless because you would need to sit and listen to hours of recordings or performances in order to understand how to listen to the condensed version anyway. Yes. I think if we consider this six minutes or three minutes condensed version of a raag structure as a reference, then the students could learn from it. Indian classical music is particularly based on building blocks like taans and then you do permutation/combination and develop a sonic architecture which is based on building on these blocks. The blocks can be smaller, but those blocks can also be used for developing an architecture from a very subjective understanding of the raag. It’s a meditative and intuitive approach of building this sonic architecture but the limitation of time keeps it under six minutes. Yes, it’s exactly like you said. Sanju ji would sit and give us one tiny pattern or a core phrase upon which all of the other phrases were built. It is a phenomenal composition tool and it used to baffle me. How was it possible that you could pull out so many variations in so many different ways—emotionally, rhythmically, dynamically— from such a tiny amount of material? But, like I said, if I only had that one tiny little thing with no other contextual information, then it was useless. This, I think, was a primary problem of the entire early-orientalist approach—to try and capture these condensed moments and use them as representations, but with very little contextual information. This is a complete waste. It has literally taken a century for us to get to the point where we can extract the amount of detail that is embedded in those moments. In the way that the academic curriculum is devised, there is a lens that is problematic in the sense that it looks through a colonial gaze. When you started to study ethnomusicology, didn’t you feel that way? Actually, I was very lucky. I think the SOAS music department—as much as it has its problems and maybe more so today—was at the time tackling the subject head on; all of our teachers were doing this from my first classes. In the first year we would do an overview of the music of the world which was very superficial, but it gave us insights into all these different musical cultures. That allowed us to then decide what we were most excited about in order to take our studies into deeper layers through the second and the third year of

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the BA. I really appreciated it; I thought it was beautiful. In that first year, I learned very simple information about the music of India, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. It opened my mind to different musical possibilities. I was listening to Korean drumming, Indian Tabla, Cuban Bata drumming. It was just mind-blowing for me. The main reason was because our teachers contextualised these problematic armchair ethnomusicologists who left all these traces with a very colonialist and imperialist gaze, and encouraged us to always question the source material that we were asked to read or things that we would come across throughout our research. I do agree with you that ethnomusicology does have these problems, but at the same time, I would say that there are a lot of great scholars who are very well aware of this and who make sure that this discussion is laid out on the table. In comparison with studying musicology at a Western-­ music centric university or conservatoire, I think this difference in reality is like night and day. BC: I was very curious about your understanding of time/temporality. Temporality is a major issue when it comes to understand how we listen to non-Western music. In classical Western music, there is a sense of linearity, of progression and a predominantly linear structure of development. But in many of the non-Western musical practices, generally speaking, it’s atemporal in the sense that it can develop for a longer period without having an end or a beginning. How do you like to bridge these two temporal worlds? One is linear and durational and the other one has a non-durational approach in sonic philosophy and in art. KA: That’s very difficult, Budhaditya. I’ve been thinking about this a lot from the angle of repetition. What we hear a lot about in Western music—to use a very generalised term—is temporal repetition which is well defined. So that might be defined either in terms of the waltz as a rhythm or it might be defined as a chord progression within a temporal definition and repetition. When you come closer to our modern age now with the Minimalist composers’ school, their idea of repetition was quite influenced by non-Western music; there’s this idea of the repetition of rhythmic and melodic blocks with regard to their temporal content. The same thing also happens in something like Indian Tabla performance because there’s this concept of permutations, which is similar to the idea of theme and

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variation but it’s treated very differently and is far more malleable. However, when it comes to the melodic traditions especially when we’re talking about the music of the Arab world or India or even the Middle East at large (like Persian, Turkish, Azerbaijani music etc.), the idea of repetition is very different. What you are repeating, essentially, are the intervallic relationships between different pitch classes. So you’re not repeating a specific melodic fragment that you then permutate in different ways, but you are repeating a state. The repetition is in the reusing of these intervallic relationships in order to maintain that state and then to go deeper into it. One thing I absolutely love about Indian music philosophy is the concept of rasa and the different characteristics and flavours that different ragas have and how they are brought out. It’s really a journey through the exposition of those characteristics. When you read about how the raags are related to this philosophy whether it is the seasonal associations, the associations with the times of day, etc., you start to understand that there is a temporality to the whole process but it’s a very abstract rendering of temporality. I think it is also on par with some of the quantum thinking that is inherent within Vedic philosophy itself. Also nature, its emergence and this idea of emergence. Absolutely. Yes, it’s that beauty of relating the musical experience to the experiences that we have within the world around us whether it is the monsoon season, sunrise, dusk or any of these different moments. I find the relationships to be incredibly powerful philosophically. It is in here, I think, that the idea of repetition takes a completely different form. Yes, from being mechanical—metronomical and mechanical. Yes. It stops being metronomical and mechanical. It is not defined by bars and measures; it is defined by feeling, by state. I find that absolutely fascinating. That’s a realisation I really only became aware of in the last few months while I was working on these tuning tools, because all of a sudden these states were more and more accessible in different sonic ways. But going back to your question, I think the concept of temporality and the division of time is very prominent in music from all over the world. You listen to Kora performances from Senegal or Mali or any kind of folk songs from anywhere in the world and you will find that division of time and

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repetition are very prominent.8 But I think it also really depends on the culture. If you look at something like a Shakuhachi performance in Japan, the concept of time is even beyond the concept of time in a raag performance. There’s something completely abstracted in the expression. When you look at Tibetan scores, the way that time is delineated is fascinating as it is somehow proportional—it has to do with a concept of relativity. I think it’s incredibly complex and difficult to try and put things up against each other in a binary fashion; there’s too much of a grey area there. BC: Yeah, and some of the grey areas are covered by the idea of modernism in music. It is in the way Western modernism is embedded in the systems of quantification, measurement and registration or writing, and the need to objectify the musical emergence into fixed notations, and also in the same way it’s reflected in the equal temperament. This is what you also discussed in your own work. KA: Yes, absolutely. I mean this is one of the biggest problems that we can find in colonialist and imperialist legacies. There was a huge desire during Victorian-Era England to search within the sciences for universalities. There was an obsession with the idea of universality where everything could be quantified and there was this idea that you could somehow get to the core of things and then be able to reduce everything down to a mathematical formula. Obviously, this obsession when it comes to temperament and tuning in music has been around since forever, but more prominently I would say from the fifteenth century onwards. There is this obsession with the comma and the fact that the octave can never be reached if you do a cycle of fifths because in nature, the octave is always spiralling out a little bit further. This was a huge problem for the Europeans. There had to be a way to organise this information into something that was logical. Equal temperament is for me; therefore, incredibly symbolic—the main reason being that it is just a theory. Equal temperament, as much as people tried, was never really practised until digital synthesisers and digital music-making tools allowed for its absolute accuracy. Tuning a piano to equal temperament is incredibly difficult. Most pianos are tuned to a stretched tuning where the lower octave actually goes down lower and the upper octave goes higher in terms of pitch because of the tension of the strings and 8

 Kora is a stringed instrument, for example, a bridge harp, used extensively in West Africa.

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the desire to get a nice resonance across all the notes. So equal temperament as an idea was born—in my view—out of a desire to put everything down into a very neat and equally divided form. Even though it was discovered using mathematical ratios, it never really picked up until Alexander Ellis devised the cents system. Everything now is divided into equal parts, it is perfect and it works; even if that was contrary to musical practice throughout the entire period, equal temperament became more and more prevalent. In a way, it’s really a fantasy and was never really realised until the digital tools made it available. But I also wanted to share with you a quote. There’s a researcher by the name of Ernest G McClain who has done a lot of work looking at ancient tuning systems and representations from Babylon to the Greeks. He mentions that in Plato’s Republic, when Plato’s references the idea of the ‘Music of the Spheres’ and the Sirens who sing the celestial harmony, Plato also references that the Fates must interfere in the orbits to keep them perfectly coordinated; they are tempering the relationships that these planets have with each other—musical mathematical relationships.9 McClain then states that equal temperament is the closest realisation of Plato’s ideas that are laid out in the Republic. I found this incredibly fascinating. My view is that Plato is a fascist. Plato wanted to control the music that people were allowed to hear in his ideal city. He very specifically states that certain modes should not be played because they agitate a certain kind of feeling in mankind that is not suitable for this perfect Republic. The idea of the Fates tempering the spheres is perfectly in line with his philosophy which is that we have this world/ nature which has all of these mathematical universalities embedded within it, but at the same time it has deviations, and so one must be able to control it. One must be able to control it in order to create a perfect Republic. I find this incredibly fascinating because you can see a trail of that thinking right through up to the modern-day. BC: This is the very core of the European imperialism and colonialism, and the root of it is the sense of sovereignty, control and surveillance. Sovereignty comes with a false assumption of superiority as

9  McClain, Ernest G. (1984). Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself. Wellington, FL: Nicolas-Hays.

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well, because superiority is used as an argument by which a culture gets the legitimacy to dominate another. KA: I totally agree with you, but I would also go as far as to say that all of this comes from an inferiority complex. Imagine you are a European student and you are studying for example Plato, Socrates and everybody else. Let us say you’re living in the middle of the nineteenth century and you come across a translated extract of Vedic philosophy. If I was that person who had spent all this time reading about the greatness of the Greeks, believing them to be the cradle of philosophy, sciences, politics, etc., and suddenly I was faced with a philosophy that is far more complex, with a far longer history, the inferiority complex would be devastating. BC: Yes, the same thing happened to Westerners like T. S. Eliot, who came in contact with Indian philosophy. He was studying Indian philosophy and later Buddhist philosophy and he came up with the idea that it is so vast and complex that it diminishes the way Europeans have such pride about Western philosophy—in its content and tradition; he contended that Western philosophy is just miniscule in scope. KA: Absolutely. I have yet to come across a single philosophical idea that does not exist in some shape or form or is not mentioned or referenced somehow, in the Vedic scriptures. I guess the European mentality at the time was that these ideas may be mentioned but there was no quantification. The world must be renderable in mathematics in order for it to be somehow accepted as science. I find this to be an incredibly problematic approach and equal temperament, in fact, is a direct representation of this idea. Did you know that when Ellis translated Helmholtz’s On the Perception of Tone, he actually replaced all of the original ratio values that Helmholtz had published in his original work with the cents values from the system that he had developed?10 I’m not saying that the cents system is not valid, but what Ellis did was incredibly problematic. The entirety of literature about tuning and temperament throughout history was all written in terms of ratios and in terms of the relativity of these different pitch classes to the reference pitch. He removed those and put cents values. There is a completely different feeling and 10  Helmholtz, Hermann von (1885). On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (Translated by Alexander John Ellis). London: Longmans, Green.

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­ nderstanding that comes from looking at ratios and from looking u at the very hard lines that are defined by the cents value. When I recently discovered this, I found it incredibly problematic because it is representative of this need/drive to quantify everything and to be able to represent it with very clean numbers and lines on a piece of paper. It’s also about writing things down, and we still have this problem in academia until today. The authoritative representation of an idea is when you can write it down on a piece of paper. BC: Yes, this is the classic McLuhanian view: anything oral which cannot be noted down is inferior to the visual representation of phenomena into writing, registration of thoughts into writing. This ritual-aural binary is suggested by McLuhanian media philosophy through his early writings. KA: Yes, I’m not sure if I would go that far because if we think about writing, the Mesopotamians wrote things down on clay tablets. I don’t think the issue is the act of writing itself. I think the issue is how you represent an idea and the value that is placed on an idea that is written in a certain way versus being written in another way. We know that the Vedic philosophies were passed down orally for centuries before they were written down. But when they were written down in Sanskrit, they didn’t lose any of their potency; they didn’t lose any of their value in the same way that the hieroglyphic writings of the ancient Egyptians or the cuneiform writings of the Mesopotamian didn’t lose their value. The problem is that the way they are written is so abstract that it is quite difficult to dig into it and pull out the content. So the European mentality is the one where you need to be able to write things down in an incredibly clear way such that it can all be understood scientifically. If something can’t be understood, and must be intuited or needs other contextual research, then it has a lesser value. When we talk about music, there is a tablet from the old Babylonian period that has a list of numbers on it and a drawing of a seven-pointed star which according to some researchers is actually representative of the way that the Mesopotamians made an analogy between their tuning system, their modes, and their metaphysical, cosmological worldview of all the different gods (because certain gods had numerical values associated with them). This was roughly between 2500 and 1500 BCE. They wrote this information down, but it still relies on a lot more contextualised research to understand its concept and intent.

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The ­symbolism was the only way to represent such complex ideas that could not be quantified any way you turn them. BC: Yes, giving more value to the recorded, registered and written down aspects of experience rather than respecting the irreducible ephemerality of it reminds me of how the binary between ‘parole’ and ‘langue’ works. ‘Parole’ is when you speak and ‘langue’ is a linguistic structure like insertion or the prisoning of the idea. KA: Maybe, but I don’t think it has to do with writing itself. I think it has to do with what you are writing. The Mesopotamian tablets that describe their modes and how to cycle through them are incredibly powerful and show that there must have been far more complex ideas going on around that time that weren’t written down in some way. But for the European mind, it’s too poetic and abstract because there aren’t any hard facts in it because we don’t have, for example, a reference. They didn’t say that you needed to tune the first string to the note that you would hear from a bamboo pipe that has the length of whatever value. The Chinese had a numerical system that was nonnary, and their records of tuning express numerical values for different bamboo pipes. This is a very solid, clear, quantifiable representation of an idea. Whereas something like the Vedic scriptures or the written version of the Vedic scriptures or these Mesopotamian tablets are much more nuanced and abstracted and poetic. They don’t have the hard facts embedded in them and therefore they are somehow represented as being less valuable. But even when you do have that available in the Chinese documentation, you also get an inferiority complex because the Chinese scholars had discovered these ideas and articulated them in numbers so perfectly that it is bypassed and marginalised. So something new had to be created in order to reassert the supremacy. The cents system in itself, as a construct, is a wonderful and incredibly powerful tool for measurement and comparison. But the fact that Ellis replaced all the ratios with his own cents values gives a different authority to his text, and for me is a representation of the mentality we’re discussing. BC: Yes, I have read that Maqāms were interpreted by a colonial Dutch musicologist who couldn’t understand the intricacies of the system and was breaking them down into 12 tone equal temperaments thereby reducing the scope of the Maqāms as it was read by the European as a canonical work.

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KA: Yes, J. P. N. Land. I still haven’t managed to find the original version of his text. But basically everything that discusses Arabic music up until the work of George Farmer in the early twentieth century was referencing Land and most of that came through everybody referencing Alexander Ellis’s translation of Helmholtz, which relies on Land. It’s a very clear line of sources. Land is the one who came up with the term of the ‘neutral third’ for representing this very characteristic interval of Arabic music. From what I’ve read in terms of references to his work, it’s very clear that he had a Western colonialist gaze and a very limited understanding of this music because he translated extracts of Al Farabi’s Kitab Al Musiqa ̄ from manuscripts, so he had no practical relationship with the music.11 Maybe he might have visited North Africa, I’m not sure, but as far as I’m aware, he had no physical contact with the Arab world at all. Again this reliance on manuscripts and writings in order to translate things and therefore represent or make authoritative representations of those materials is another incredibly problematic thing and it has caused more harm than good. There’s a certain authority that academic scholars of that period had especially because they were all doing these things for the first time. Before the eighteenth century, there were such few translations of these concepts that the person who translated them was immediately in a position of authority and power. This authority was very rarely critiqued, and by that I mean evaluated for its positive and its negative content, for its understandings and its misunderstandings. People just took that information as if it was 100% correct and that has led us down the path of this incredibly problematic representation of culture because much of it is based on misunderstandings. BC: Yes, on limited understanding. KA: Yes, limited understanding or in some cases absolute misunderstanding and misrepresentation. BC: Absolutely, misrepresentations. I would say these are the damaging aspects of the European gaze and European representation of a culture, of different cultures, plurivocal cultures. There were also instances of resistance. One resistance I can tell you about is from the group of Dhrupad performers around 1902, when recording technology came and the East India Company—the colonial  Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir is a treatise on music by the medieval philosopher al-Farabi.

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c­ ompany—sent representatives to record musical practices in South Asia. Representatives were also sent to Africa. A group of performers refused to get their performances recorded. They suggested that this is a contamination of their sounds, of the particular sonic cultures as they did not want to record for that limited amount of time; this would temper the way they practise an alive sonic tradition. This was one of the resistances. I see ‘Apotome’—your tool— is a kind of resistance as well. Do you see ‘Apotome’ in this way? KA: Absolutely, 100%. I’ve mentioned a few times in some of the interviews and public presentations I’ve given about this subject that the tools themselves are great, they are amazing. But what is more important is the discourse that they are triggering. By making these tools available and by making this aspect of music accessible, unveiled and intuitive (it is not simplified because the ideas that are presented are very complex but at least it is accessible) in a way it becomes easy to engage with. This, for me, is all politics and it is resistance, of course, because I am trying to find a way to unshackle myself creatively. For many years, I have felt incredibly repressed musically. I can turn to traditional musical instruments and remain in this glass cabinet of tradition and reverence of this tradition by playing only Oud and maybe I would have some room to be able to create contemporary experimental abstract Oud compositions that would be somehow accepted, but I can go nowhere else. I can’t use modern technology; I can’t use modern sounds neither to teach, nor learn nor create. I found this to be incredibly limiting. This is repression. These tools and all of this discourse for me are about trying to find creative freedom and individual freedom within the creative process. I always felt that this particular point was never focused on in any discussions surrounding the role of tuning, music making, technology, the white racial frame, etc. BC: When working with technologies, there is a particular way of not only presentation but also mediation—using presets, for example. Presets are of another hegemonic structure: you are given a preset and this power of the preset does not let you freely improvise. When you use technology, how do you like to hack it? You can either personalise it in your own way or give agency to the technology itself. How do you navigate this problem? KA: We discussed this a lot when we were building Leimma and Apotome. By ‘we’ I mean myself, Tero Parviainen and Samuel

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Diggins who are collaborators on this project. My feeling—which is what we can see in the final result—is that the technology should not insinuate anything to the user. What presets do is that they insinuate a certain method of usage. By creating this project without this insinuation, I can see why the insinuation was seen as something beneficial. I’ve had many people write to me and say I can’t get Apotome to work. Users expect that they will open up a piece of software and that it will just do something for them straight away. Apotome, particularly, doesn’t do anything. When you open it up, even if you press play or start, nothing happens. You get no sound, you get no movement—you get barely any visualisation. This is because it’s designed in a way that it shouldn’t insinuate either a compositional path or a technological imposition of an idea—obviously within its logic of being a generative system. The default of Apotome is that everything is turned off and so in order to make anything happen you have to engage, and the first decision that you must take before anything will work, is to choose the tuning system and the subset. Just having that action as the first action that must be taken is an incredibly political and powerful statement for me. The user must choose which musical culture they want to explore. This is now a choice; in the past, it has never been a choice. You load up a piece of music software and the musical culture that is represented is Western, European and equal temperament, major, minor. It’s imposed on you before you have the chance to actually do anything. So I think that was a crucial point in the way that we decided to create these tools. Besides that, I don’t think presets are a bad thing per se. Nevertheless, I must say that one needs to be careful about what is insinuated by the presets and we need to think about the extra musical contextual arena in which the preset lives. When you open a software synth, a hardware synth and you go through the presets and then you read something like Sahara, it insinuates a certain association. Then when you play it and it sounds like a Tanpura, you have Orientalism in one preset. So it actually re-perpetuates an orientalist, imperialist, supremacist and colonialist worldview. That’s in one preset. Now if that was by innocence or ignorance, it doesn’t matter. There’s a problem here, and I think most manufacturers and designers are not interrogating the history of such associations: the Sahara desert is an Arabic land of camels

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and Islam, and camels and deserts are somehow related to India, and therefore you can put all of this into one thing. Yes. Do you think Apotome is an attempt to decolonise the sonic fixation that Europe had for many years? Yeah, I do. I’ve tried to stay away from using the word decolonisation because I think it’s being overused these days. But ultimately, yes, because it gives agency to all of these other musical cultures. It actually highlights the problems with equal temperament and allows people to explore others. So both Apotome and Liemma fall into the same category here. They definitely are an attempt to awaken such an understanding of music and also to highlight the fact that what we think of as music today—this fundamental element of music—stems from a supremacist and a colonialist place. I don’t think that this has been really discussed at all when it comes to music technology these days. Yes, I think the term ‘decolonisation’ is overused, but it is needed in the sense that Western colonial discourse was a developing discourse after the World War and after around the 50s and 60s, many of the cultures threw away the colonial rulers like India and many parts of Africa did, through anti-colonial movements. Post-colonial discourse came out from that particular trajectory of thinking, but it was not an activist terminology. When it comes to ‘Black Lives Matter’ and enacting the discourse into action then decolonisation has become a kind of keyword at this very moment and because of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ and many other anti-colonial revolutions across the world, decolonisation as a word has become a necessary buzzword. I think even though it is fetishistic in a way and it is being overused, it has its own necessity in this world. It is needed not only to understand the de-structural aspect of what we do, but also at the same time for having an activist perspective on what needs to be done at the very moment—this sense of urgency is proliferated by the term ‘decolonisation’. Yes, I agree with you 100% but I have been thinking a lot about the language that we use to discuss these topics specifically because I’ve now been in a position where I have opportunities and platforms from which I can express my ideas and therefore I need to find the language that I think is useful. I therefore started interrogating myself and my own language in the same way that I have been interrogating all of the inherited biases that are present within the

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subject. I realised that I was also inheriting these keywords without really considering them: decolonisation, postcolonial thought, all of these different terminologies that are used; non-Western, microtonality—all these keywords. BC: ‘Tradition’ is another problematic term. KA: Yes, I started to consider them deeply, and I realised that they’re all problematic. Most of them centre the very thing that we are trying to discuss and critique and find a way out of. So by saying postcolonial or decolonise, we are centring the colonisation process and the coloniser, in my view. By saying non-Western, we are centring the West again. By saying microtonality, we are centring the Western view on the music of the rest of the world, right? BC: Yes. KA: The other element of this is, if we say ‘decolonising’, we are insinuating that we need to remove something that has negative repercussions, therefore implying negation and an enemy—something that we must fight against. I think that this is incredibly valid and I think that the idea that there is a problem we need to confront and deal with and remove from society in some way, from our language and from our thinking, is incredibly important. But, in light of 2020 and the amount of division that has happened, the segregation of ideas and vitriolic disgusting language that is being used, I decided quite late on in the process, that I didn’t want to use these terms, that I would try to refrain from using them or I would use them as little as possible because I don’t want to centre the very thing that I’m critiquing. At the same time, I do not want to participate in a language that is divisive. I want to represent a different way of looking at this which is inclusive and equal. I think that all musical cultures are equally important. They are all valid and we need to put them all on the same level. We cannot continue saying: this musical culture is primitive because they only use pentatonic notes and therefore twentieth-century serialism is far superior. I want to participate in a discourse that allows all musical traditions to be on the same level and that’s why I started to use the word ‘transcultural’ to describe Apotome and Liemma rather than words like decolonising tools or tools for decolonising or microtonality. I just say transcultural tuning and I think for me this has more power in it even though it’s less sexy. Decolonisation is sexy because it shows that there is a problem and that there is something we must resist

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whereas transcultural tuning is like a pair of open arms and I think open arms are what we all need right now. They are far less inciting than something that can pinpoint an aggravation or aggravate something. By saying this, I really want to be very clear: I don’t mean to somehow minimise the way that these words are being used by other scholars and activists who are on the frontlines of a very different kind of resistance than I am. All I’m trying to say is that I think it’s important to self-critique, and by saying that, I also refer to self-analysis and self-evaluation, as much as I do to criticising others Yes, it’s very beautiful the way you put it—transcultural. But I was also thinking whether it’s possible to avoid and to not recognise the violence that took place for more than 300 years of colonialism and imperialism that were engineered by Europe. It’s impossible, you’re right. It’s impossible to ignore the violence. The damages. Absolutely. Kofi Agawu has a great article about tonality and the colonial impact on tonality in Africa.12 Let me pull out the quote for you because I don’t want to paraphrase him. He says, ‘In domesticating hymns whose texts were originally in German or English for local consumption, melodies that disregarded the natural declamation of indigenous singing and rode roughshod over the international countries of speech tones. This is musical violence of a very high order. A violence whose psychic and psychological impact remained to be properly explored by scholars’. Yes, I totally resonate with it because I have heard in my own ears and seen the ramifications of that violence, eradication and erasure of many sonic cultures. I will just mention one that is about the indigenous ways of tuning bells that indigenous people use in rituals. For years, an embedded knowledge system has been transferred from one generation to the other—how to tune a bell by hearing. This entire system was removed by the technological modernity where now they tune a bell by a machine. Absolutely. The same is happening to all of the Balafons, Koras and Mbiras across the African continent. In Arabic music and Persian music, musicians are moving their frets and they are tuning their

12  Agawu, Kofi (2009). “Tonality as a colonizing force in African music”. Distinguished Lecture at Princeton University, USA.

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strings to twelve-tone equal temperament tuners. I watched a video yesterday on YouTube which is about someone making and tuning a Balafon (it’s not clear which African country they are from). The maker is literally hitting the Balafon and tuning it to one of those little cheap Korg digital tuners. It absolutely is a disaster. There’s another quote from Agawu, from the same article ‘Forms of diatonic harmony and modest phrase bound tonal trajectories served and continue to serve as powerful agents in the musical colonisation of Africa or of the colonisation of the musical consciousness of many Africans’. I think here he really puts his finger on the problem by pointing out that this isn’t just a colonisation in the violence imposed upon the actual music itself or the musical instrument. It’s a violence that is imposed on the musical consciousness of people from different cultures. When I heard him saying this, all the hair on my body stood up on end. Today, if I go out in Beirut or in Cairo or anywhere else, so much of the music people are hearing, all the devices that they have and all the melodies that they hear every day are all tempered. The equal temperament. Yeah, everything is. Even this infamous ‘neutral third’ of Arabic music has become tempered. It’s now -50 cents—a 24 equal division of the octave. How do you resist this profound violence? Firstly, I’m resisting by making tools to represent these ideas in a different way. Second, I think what we need to focus on the knowledge transfer more than the tools. We need to be active in sharing these ideas and encouraging these discourses, in teaching, in writing, in talking about them. There’s no way it’s going to change unless we start to propose alternatives. It is such a pleasurable conversation that we are having. I have just one last question. What I wanted to ask you about is universalism. There’s a problem with the term universalism as well, but how do you like to posit yourself in the contemporary conundrum? If you think of yourself in this current global context, one understands the necessity of solidarity and equality. When it comes to positioning yourself within the global sonic practices, how do you like to position yourself? Do you like to identify yourself as someone from the Middle East or as someone who navigates between Europe and

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Asia or somebody who doesn’t have any identification? How do you like to self-determine yourself within contemporary context? KA: It’s a difficult one and it’s a question that I’ve been thinking about a lot for a very long time because of all these connotations. When I was first playing Oud and I had a mentorship from BBC Radio 3 and I played at the BBC Proms, my identity as an Iraqi was the thing that was being used to sell me and the project. It’s difficult because if I say that I don’t want to be associated with my own culture, my own background, I am negating an incredibly important part of my world view and my history. Then somehow I centre myself again within the context of whoever wants to present or represent me. But at the same time if I want to be adamant and to say, ‘I’m an Iraqi’, then this puts me in a different kind of box. I become categorised in a different way and treated in a different way. I’ve come to just accept that, that’s what it is. I refuse to erase any element of my identity anymore in order to somehow benefit from something else. I am an Iraqi even though I have never lived in Iraq and I was not born there. My family is Iraqi, that’s my culture, language and my worldview. That’s where it stems from. My worldview stems from my parents’ lived experiences and the history that they had to go through. I am a product of their lived experience, which means I am a product of an Iraqi experience: the experience of Saddam Hussein, the experience of my parents having members of their family and their siblings killed or disappeared, the fact that they needed to leave their homeland and in the end find a route as refugees and their lived experience of being refugees in the UK, trying to raise me and my sister. I am a direct product of that. If I do not say and be proud of saying—‘I am an Iraqi’, I feel that I’m doing a disservice to the struggles that they have had to go through in order to create the opportunities for me to be able to do what I’m doing today. So that’s a very personal response but that’s how complex it is for me; at the same time, just saying that I’m an Iraqi, is obviously not congruent with the fact that I was raised mostly in the UK that I have a European upbringing and appreciation of European and American culture as well. So that is equally a part of me. Much of my musical experience was listening to punk rock bands and metal bands from England and America. That’s obviously a big part of my worldview as well; the DIY community and DIY thinking really impacted me and still does till today. So it’s

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difficult, but I try to find a way to navigate it all. I must say that when it comes to the idea of universalism, the only thing that I would ever be able to associate with this is the idea of the universalism of difference. We need to start celebrating differences much more than we need to continue celebrating similarities. I think an appreciation of difference will help create more unity rather than trying to find similarities. Common grounds are the easy globalist way out of it. ‘Hey, you’re from Serbia, I’m from Cairo yeah, we both eat this kind of food or we both have this kind of thing’ or ‘Oh, yeah my family also does this at this particular time of year’. This globalised multicultural nonsense that we can all find a common ground in our similarities is what led us here today. I try to imagine what Iraq would be like if in schools everybody was taught Arabic and a couple of different Kurdish dialects, maybe even Turkish and Persian. What would Iraq be like? What would it have become? How would it have been a different society? What if, when at school, we are not taught to talk about Africa as one place, as one thing? What if we learn to say the African continent and to talk about the different countries in Africa as places that are home to all different kinds of peoples? What if we learned in school that in India, there are over four hundred different languages? BC: Yeah. Is it possible to like, David Morley13 has coined a phrase: ‘living with the difference’? What you are saying is very much resonating with the idea that living with the difference is the future. I mean not necessarily finding common ground, but finding and celebrating the differences that we have without it leading to divisiveness. KA: Absolutely. But compromise is one thing, commonalty is something else entirely. Me and you, we can learn to accept and understand all the differences between us, but with that, we can also learn to compromise. We don’t have to find commonality in order to be able to compromise. We can base our compromise also on our differences. BC: Yes, in the same way, I would like to suggest that instead of tolerance we need to focus on reciprocity. Tolerance suggests imbalances in the power structure—majority tolerates minority groups.

13  See: David Morley (2002). Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge.

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But reciprocity is on equal ground and we talk to each other with a sense of equity. Yes, it is mutual respect. It’s so basic. Why just tolerate? To tolerate something means literally something that you don’t really like but you’re prepared to put up with. Yes, and that’s Europe’s contemporary crisis of how to deal with migration. The question is whether the European society is able to have an equal dialogue with a migrant body and migrant voice. That’s the question. Yes, of course. And unfortunately, most of the time they’re not because there is an inherited supremacy and the inheritance itself is not being questioned, critiqued, and discussed. We have been too busy talking about the peripherals of problems and not talking about the source. And for me, the source lies in inherited ideas most often. Therefore, if we want to talk about the problems of migration and racism today, we shouldn’t be talking about whether the local German guy who runs the shop around the corner from my house or who works in the supermarket should be tolerating me being a migrant into his city. Maybe we should be talking about where his lack of tolerance comes from. And if we say that it comes from the media, then where did the media get it from? I think we need to start learning how to trace things back to their sources. Because when we do, that’s when we can start to properly unpack these problems. What Philip Ewell’s work did for me was sublime because he traced this idea of modern musical education right back to its supremacist sources. And so it’s all out on the table. What we’ve been taking for granted, the inherited knowledge that we use every day actually comes from a place of supremacy, therefore we need to change. It becomes much easier to negotiate at that point when these things are interrogated. If they’re not, we’re just going to carry on going around in circles biting our own tails. Absolutely. To wrap up, that’s the reason for this project. I was conceptualising and conceiving this project as a tool to self-­ determine, because I also face this violence of European colonisation of sound practice and I want to not only resist in my own way but also self-determine. Where do I belong? I want to have a historical consciousness which is necessary to develop in order to put myself in context.

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KA: Absolutely. The positionality is key. But then we also have to be aware. I have come across a lot of different projects where there’s this kind of discourse going on but at the end of the day, the tools and the language that are being used are things that come directly out of that textbook. I think we also need to interrogate and create tools that are relevant for our own practice that may actually have relevance for other practices too. We need to think not only about what we are doing, but how we are doing it, and what the tools that we are using are. Whether they be linguistic tools in terms of language and terminology like we talked about earlier, or whether they are the tools that we need to actually create something. BC: Yes, thank you for this pleasurable conversation. I would like to follow up when we meet in Berlin. KA: Absolutely. I really appreciate you reaching out and I would love to welcome you whenever you’re here.

CHAPTER 11

Cedrik Fermont

Cedric Fermont (Zaire 1972), known as C-drík or Kirdec, is a vegan artist, academically trained musician, DJ, singer, composer and drummer. He was born in Zaire, Democratic Republic of Congo, and at the moment lives in Berlin. C-drík grew up in Belgium and the Netherlands before he moved to Germany. He studied electro-acoustic music in Belgium, under the direction of Annette Vande Gorne. Since 1989, Fermont has been active in several music projects such as Č rno Klank, Axiome, Tasjiil Moujahed as well as a solo artist. He has collaborated with musicians from the free improvised, noise and electro-acoustic music scenes. In 2017, Fermont was co-awarded the prestigious Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica in digital music and sound art. He runs Syrphe, an online platform for alternative musicians from Asia and Africa. This conversation transpired in the kitchen of Cedric Fermont in Berlin. He invited me for lunch and in between his cooking, we spoke. The traffic was quite loud from the nearby highway of Berlin. Hence, we moved later from the kitchen to the decorated common areas of the building. As we spoke, a few of his apartment mates were passing by. I was recording the entire discussion, from which it was transcribed. BC: I would like to ask you about your background in coming to work with sound artistically. Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Cedrik Fermont—CF © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_11

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CF: That is a very long story. BC: Then let’s start with the long story. CF: I started to be interested first in electronic and industrial music in the 80s, when I was a teenager. I wanted to discover more and more. But back then it was not as easy as it is now, for example, without the internet. But I had friends who could copy tapes or recommend some cassettes and vinyls to me. I very quickly jumped into noise music and experimental music, electro-acoustic and so on. Back then I was not calling this sound art but the sound itself was something of great interest for me. I like melodies and songs as well, but I always enjoyed just listening to the sound, so that to me means it is not only pure music but going into the wild and listening to a stream or to the tree leaves when the wind blows and so on. I thought I could incorporate these things in my music. I started my first band in 1989 and that was more of industrial music, but I liked to incorporate noises, accidents and so on in the music even though it still had some kind of so-called musical structure—a rhythm or maybe lyrics. But more and more quickly, I went into more abstract music so to speak, and was tweaking sound with cassettes, cutting cassettes tapes, doing collages and pitching. That also led me to start doing field recordings much later—as soon as I could get a portable recorder. I either used them like this to publish or share, or incorporated them into my compositions—pure or treated, filtered, etc. Later I also studied electro-acoustic music and I realised how important the sound itself, the dynamics of it and the various frequencies were for me and not the so-called melodic aspects or whatever of traditional music in the large sense. Basically I saw it as a bit like an abstract painting. Somehow to me it’s a bit like this. But I always found it weird that so many people had or still have a problem with sound art or abstract music, but they can easily accept abstract paintings or pictures, you know. And then I did some sound installations but I never really dove deeply into sound installations. I worked with it for audio-visual installation or pure sound installations like quadraphonic, hexaphonic and so on. For example, I did sound installations collaborating sometimes with other people. I still do it, but it’s rare. The last time I did it was more than a decade ago for a project in Belgium. I just like sounds in general. I like to treat them or use them purely, but they bring a lot of memories when I work with field recordings; I am the only

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one to know the context, which to me is interesting. I like to work with sounds like this and hear people sometimes telling me ‘I hear this, I feel this, this memory pops up’. But I always kind of smile because I know it cannot be corresponded to my own experience, and that to me is more powerful than an image, a picture, a painting and so on. Yeah, I think briefly, I started treading that path. But from a young age I found that it is sound—that is very interesting to me and not only the note of an instrument. It has never really been important for me to—ever since I discovered electronic music—have something well coded like it should be. It’s just a really personal feeling, I don’t know. It’s a pleasure for the ears, I love sound and I wanted to go on and on in this direction and don’t only do sound art and electro-acoustic music. I do a lot of other things, but I mostly do this because to me, it’s a bit of total freedom to work in such a way with sound. Can you go back and remember the kind of inspirational sparks that led you to work with sound? It could be personal experiences, or some kind of exposure, some interest; can you talk about these inspirations? The one thing I often remember is that when I was a kid, I loved to make sounds with my mouth and listen to them. In your mouth? Yeah, or I would close my ears and listen to the internal sounds or play around by pressing my fingers to the ears to change the kind of frequency that would enter my ears. I wanted to really find a way of how I would perceive the world in fact. Kind of mimicry? Yeah. And what really triggered this was the discovery of many industrial experimental artists in the eighties. For example, a band that kind of touched me was Étant Donnés; it’s a band from France, a duo.1 You grew up in France? No, in Belgium. You were born in Belgium or in Congo? In the Congo; Zaire, back then.

1  Born in Rabat, Morocco, Eric and Marc Hurtado founded the band Etant Donnés in 1977 that quickly became essential in the field of experimental music and music concrèteproducing around 30 albums.

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BC: And in which year did you move to Europe? CF: I was two years old when I moved to Belgium. This band was mostly using field recordings and a lot of recordings from nature like insects, the woods and so on, but they would not reject other sounds like a helicopter passing by. On top of this, one of the members would whisper some poem in French and scream and shout as well. So it was really about the sound, the power of the sound and the noises of the sound. There were no melodies, notes or anything. It was very close to abstraction, basically. I found it very interesting and that triggered something in me that made me think ‘Oh, we can also make music in such a way and not necessarily use a synthesizer, guitar or whatever’. Often there were bands, Einstürzende Neubauten, for example, but they still have a sort of classical structure—it is a song most of the time. Étant Donnés went much further, then I discovered, around that same time, many other abstract artists like P16.D4, Merzbow and all these experimental and noise bands and I thought that was interesting and I started to play with a double deck recorder together with a radio. I just looked for the frequencies where there were no channels and got through all the noises, recorded them on tape and did some collages where I was trying to pitch them, play and reverse. So I think it really started like this from 1989, 1990 and 1991—since then I started to tweak sound. I wanted to recreate some atmosphere so to speak from abstract sounds. It was a lot about feelings for me; this kind of sound art or experimental music is full of feelings to me and it is not like that to everybody. Yeah, I think it started like this. Then I quickly enjoyed scratching a metal plate, for example, hearing the result of beating a pot and listening to the resonance and then just grabbing the resonance and not the rest. So I was just touching objects. Again when I went deeper and deeper, I started to record dried tree leaves. I still use a lot of metals. I collect metal junks on the streets here in Berlin nonstop; it’s an obsession. I am storing plenty of things like this. I always listen to a pipe or metal plate, I check how it sounds and if I can use it or not, and then I bring it home. BC: Found sounds. CF: Yeah, I think that’s what it is. BC: Any figures like artists, scholars, thinkers or musicians you can mention during your formative years?

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CF: Yeah, with time, of course, I started with more of the DIY scene, industrial, noise and experimental. Then I got access to a media library in Belgium. I also worked in that media library before which I studied in a Conservatory. Of course I heard John Cage, Luigi Russolo and Antonio Russolo, Stockhausen and Pauline Oliveros— all the classics you know. I read a lot and studied about the history—I mean the Western history—of experimental music and sound art. Then I did a bigger research into what happened in Latin America, but I know a bit less about the history there, and in Africa and Asia. I looked for the pioneers of electro-acoustic, sound art and tried to analyse what were their inspirations and influences according to the contexts. I would never say I have been directly influenced by somebody’s work. I try to analyse how they work and why they do it, but I never try to copy somebody’s work. I probably do it without being especially conscious about it because I listen to a lot of music and sound art. I go to exhibitions and festivals, of course at times I think—‘Oh yeah, this is an interesting way of triggering sound’ and then just start exploring by myself. I am either doing those field recordings when I am travelling, or when I am here in Berlin or when I am at home, I always listen. I realised that sometimes when I just talk to friends I ask them ‘Do you hear this?’ and they tell me ‘No’. I think most people don’t listen anymore, they just hear. When I cook, I also listen. And when I find that a sound is interesting, then I come back. For example, I have recorded water dripping on a hot pot and the water just vaporising. It’s very interesting; I composed a piece with this. I also do this with pots sometimes—‘Oh, this pot sounds very good with this lid’. Then I come back with my recorder or I bring it in my room and I record the sound. BC: That’s perhaps in the tradition of what is known as Musique Concrete. CF: Yeah, it’s very close to that. I cycle a lot and I like to cycle randomly. When I arrive somewhere, then I hear something interesting and write down where I am. I come back home, put it on the map with the notes: ‘Whatever I saw there sounds like this, I need to come back with the recorder’. I like to put things out of context as well in such a way and mix different sounds from different places that are sometimes thousands of kilometres apart. I know that to recreate something different, again I am the only one who can know that it doesn’t belong to the same place.

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BC: That’s the sonic association. Because you were born in Congo but grew up since childhood in Europe, studied, learnt and practised sound here (you surely had thought about it), but at what time were you thinking about the connection with Congo or to the auditory cultures of the African regions? CF: I was pretty young—I was probably 16 or 17, or something like that. I was a punk back then. I found it always weird that I was one of the very few brown punks in Belgium. I knew very few brown or black people joining the punk, industrial, skinhead scene or gothic scene. They were from African descent, Middle Eastern descent. Asia was always the Japanese cliché where the Japanese came from Asia, and that was it. I always wondered why it was like this. Then at 18, I started attending more concerts and always wondered why in this experimental music scene or the punk scene there were so few people of other descents and of course in Belgium we had a lot of people from the Congo, from other African countries and from Morocco, also from Indian descent or lots of people of Korean descents as well or Chinese, Vietnamese. They were almost nowhere to be seen in these scenes. Basically, I realised later that it was not only in Belgium but also the whole of Western Europe even though you would find a bit more people from South Asia in the UK and more North Africans in France. It is still a very strict minority. This is one of the multiple reasons why I started to re-dig and tried to find artists from those places and backgrounds. As I was young, I could not realise exactly the whys and the hows of this phenomenon. Of course, it took me years to understand, even though I still don’t understand everything. BC: When you started to reconnect through your curiosity and also through your practice, did the idea that Congo and other African sound cultures have some kind of influence in your practice come up? If you go back in time, do you see that as an artist when you grew up, developed your craft and your artistic imagination that there was influence from the Congolese and African sound cultures? CF: No, not directly. Strangely, it’s more from Asia. I have been much more in Eastern and South-East Asia than anywhere else, besides being in Europe I would say. BC: In the Philippines? CF: I have been almost everywhere. I have been to the Philippines, China, Macao, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Myanmar,

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Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh. And then in the Middle East as well, I have been to places like Iraqi Kurdistan, Lebanon, Turkey, but mostly it is East and South East. Since 2004, I have been there very often. I have visited places like Singapore and Malaysia at least ten times, China five times and so on. It’s just my feeling that I felt more connected to some Eastern musical practices than some of the African ones. Of course, in the case of Africa, it is big and depends on where you are. But I like the minimalism of some classical music from Laos, Vietnam, China and South Korea, because to me, it is relatively often close to what we call ‘sound art’ even though they are Classical Music. When you beat a gong very slowly and gently, waiting for the release, you wait 10 or 30 seconds and you beat it again or you play the Guqin or the Koto very quietly.2 The importance of the silence is so close. This is much older than some forms of the West’s ‘sound art’. Or even if we look at the fact that you need to be in a close environment to play, here in Europe, classical music and later on Rock and so on mostly have to be played indoors, detached from external disturbances. While if you go to Indonesia, for example, you can find people playing Gamelan outside, and they are not feeling disturbed by, for example, insects or nature and traffic. Again it (this scene) is not that far from those sound art practices and of course those North American or Australian and European sound art practices have been influenced by such traditional music and classical music from either Asia or Africa, and also by the local European traditional music as well. I always felt more connected because I like the sounds of metal, gongs, parts of the Gamelan and so on but not just that. Basically, I love some of the local instruments from Asia, like the Khaen from Laos, for example.3 Well, I would say that maybe not systematically, but often the music from Africa may be more rhythmical and beatoriented. I find that very interesting as well. Even though I learnt drums and percussion, maybe I am more into tonalities, resonances and so on. I love the Cello, I love the sound of Gongs, pieces of  Koto is a Japanese plucked half-tube zither instrument, and the national instrument of Japan. 3  Khaen is a mouth organ of Lao origin whose pipes are usually made of bamboo. 2

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metal, the release of a string instrument and so on. I must say, I know less about African music—except some of the big clichés— compared to what I know of Eastern and South Asian music. I would say that for South Asian music from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan or Bangladesh and the Eastern world or the Middle East as well. I mean, of course I knew about this music but I never explored it as much as I did in East and South-East Asia. And I think I have travelled more between East and South-East Asia, so I also got the opportunity to attend concerts of traditional and classical music, local classical music or to perform with people there especially in Laos and Vietnam, so my connection is a bit different. But nevertheless I always listen to what’s going on in Africa; I am always curious. With Congo, it’s also because I wondered why I could hardly find any ‘sound art’ out there. There are always these usual answers, you know—‘there is the war’, but this is not entirely true. There is war in parts of the Congo—it’s a huge country. It is poor, yes sure, but not everybody is poor and poverty doesn’t prevent people from exploring sound. I mean, it can be true because when you are very poor, you might not have the time to think about abstract sound art and so on, but I have met people who are not rich at all but were super inventive and really creating something. So then, there could be something cultural I don’t have the answer to. I have been looking for these answers for many years because I have been travelling quite a lot throughout North, East and southern Africa especially in the past two years. And even modern music is again, often beat oriented there. It is changing slowly in places like South Africa which is a very particular context I would say, and also in Kenya, Uganda and in North Africa. North Africa is so connected to Europe and the Middle East that their source comes from a very different context. The practice of sound art is often older in North Africa and South Africa than in the rest of Africa. Well, exceptions are always there; for example, I think about Victor Gama in Angola. But I don’t have this answer, I don’t know why even electronic or so-called experimental music is more beatoriented or poly-­rhythmic and so on in many parts of Africa compared to other parts of the world. For example, you find a lot of abstract music in Latin America or in the Middle East as well. It isn’t everywhere, but if you consider Syria for example or think about Lebanon or Iran, all those places have a very important

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sound art practice, and it is growing more and more. The thing is that when I was a teenager, I remember some Congolese artists living in Belgium were involved in the electronic music scene. It was not abstract music, it was more electro pop, synth pop, but it was not the typical Congolese music. There was Bony Bikaye who was working with Hector Zazou; they did funk, but they also did electro pop, which was very interesting music. I thought, ‘Okay, so there are people who are interested in this kind of music’, and sometimes really connected to experimental music, for example. But again that was a strict minority and I thought, ‘Okay, if those two people do that here coming from Congo, maybe there are connections’, and I tried to find out, tried to meet people. I would attempt to say, ‘Oh, you go to the Congo. Please could you try to look for this kind of music for me or bring that CD and give it to people who would be interested’. I never managed to find anyone, back then. It basically took me until now, since I have been to Uganda twice. There I met Congolese artists who do electronic music; it is not very ‘sound art’ but they are aware of this and are interested in it. I am sure there might be people, but I need to travel there once and check for myself because it is difficult to reach some parts of Africa through the internet. You need to be there. It is also why I travel so much around East Africa. There you meet people. But with Kenya, it was not the same. I had so many problems finding people in Kenya and knew there was a punk scene there. I was sure there was electronic music too. But people would tell me ‘I don’t know, we never found anything’. I would tell them ‘that’s not possible, come on, they are very well connected and I don’t believe this’. Then I went there and I met people like Joseph Kamaru—you know him, right?4 And I thought—‘Yes! See there are people here, doing this kind of sound art and experimental music, field recordings and so on’, and I met more people of course. So, I would say I never had a very strong connection with the Congo. Part of my family still lives there, part of it lives in Europe and in the USA, but I don’t have a lot of connections with my family. My culture was more limited to Congolese food and vaguely the language that my mother never taught me. I know a few words in Swahili—I don’t really speak it, unfortunately. I had Congolese 4

 A conversation with Joseph Kamaru is included in this book.

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friends so of course I was having this connection with them, but it was never deep. I was just wondering, are there people in the Congo or in other countries around playing this kind of music? If we as people of Congolese descent also do that here in Europe but again we are a very strict minority in Europe, how is it over there? I am sure we miss things because so little has been written and documented about many parts of Africa. I realise it every time I go there. Some people will speak out and say, ‘Oh, yeah, there was this person’ or ‘I met this person in the street doing tape collage, but I don’t have his contact’. This is also an issue with Africa. It is changing, but it is still a bit difficult. BC: How did you come in contact with sounds from South Asia/South-­ East Asia? CF: At first I was looking on the internet in order to find such music everywhere on earth. In the 90s I had tape labels; I was trading and buying tapes and I was wondering why I could only find music from Western Europe. Eastern Europe was difficult for us. I could find some from Czechoslovakia, some music from Poland and the USSR. Yugoslavia was a little bit easier, and so was North America—I mean Canada and USA. I had such a hard time finding anything else related to sound art or to experimental music, electronic music or industrial music coming from other places. Even Australia or New Zealand was difficult for us. There was no internet of course. You had to find a flyer or write somebody asking, ‘Do you know people in this country?’, and with time, I found people in South Africa, Brazil, Chile and Japan. By then I thought that if I find people in those four countries, I might be able to find people from everywhere. I was fairly optimistic, of course. But then the internet came and changed everything. There were all those mailing lists and forums, groups and Yahoo groups, and I saw somebody from China who posted a message on a group. It was Yan Jun, I don’t know if you know him. I started to correspond with him to know what was going on in China. I had been looking for so much music and then he told me, because he was one of the first people to have put out punk music along with some noise and experimental music in China back then. And I started to have more and more contacts, like, for example, in Turkey, and that pushed me to explore. I realised back then, that I could get contacts more easily in the East and in South East Asia, Turkey and Morocco compared to other

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places. I also got the opportunity to go to Thailand and Laos in 2004—obviously on holidays. But I wanted to play as well through Soulseek. Do you know this platform? Soulseek is still a peer-topeer platform. But it was very special because most people there were just ripping tapes and Vinyl. There was a lot of old music. It could be traditional music, it could be experimental music and punk and rock; obscure things from everywhere. There I could find these obscure tapes. There were some rooms and you could create your own room as well. There were rooms for industrial music and it was a Thai room in which I wrote, ‘Hey hello, I am going to Bangkok and other places in Thailand, I would like to know if it is possible to play’. So they replied to me saying, ‘Oh yes, I know somebody who could book you’. Then I went there and back then I was also working for a label in Singapore doing mastering. So I knew what was going on in Singapore, and I knew a tiny bit about Malaysia as well since I had contacts out there a bit later. Also, Thailand then and China, Japan, and I kept digging more and more on the internet. I went to perform and this guy from Thailand told me, ‘If you want to play in Vietnam, I know somebody who could help you’. Six months later I made a six months tour of South Korea, China and many of those places. I have been to Malaysia and so on and this triggered something. I felt that there is so much happening here that I need to come back, and I went back to more countries again and again as frequently as I could, to explore Indonesia, to explore Myanmar later, etc. I often heard people saying, ‘You will find nothing there. There is nothing here, there is nothing in Indonesia’. My Chinese friends would say, ‘What were you doing in Vietnam, we never heard about anything there’. I told them that there are people doing noise and experimental music and sound art and for sure you should be connected with them. I realised that many people in those countries knew about what was happening in Japan, Australia, Europe, but not about the neighbours. It happened so often. Singapore and Malaysia were kind of connected. Then with Indonesia, apart from the punk rock scene, it was difficult. And then if you would speak about the Philippines, no one knew what was going on in the Philippines. There were so little connections, even though they had existed in the past. I have got tapes that I managed to find there like a Filipino label (I didn’t mention it, the label’s name was Feel Free Prod.) that published

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sound art and noise music and experimental music from the Philippines, Ecuador, Finland, Germany and so on. It was in 1998. I wanted to explore more and it was also pretty easy to travel around East and South-East Asia. I didn’t need a lot of visas, it is not so expensive out there. Once you reach the place, it is kind of cheap to travel there and I met so many people who could host me and help me set up gigs and conduct this research. I also felt that I needed to find out more about what’s going on in other places. I met so many people from Lebanon in between; I don’t remember the exact time. One day I made a Balkan tour by land basically, and to explore more, I went later to Lebanon, and two years ago in northern Iraq, in Kurdistan because I realised there is so much happening in so many places that I need to go by myself. I also wanted to go to South Asia but I had only one contact out there in Bangalore; Yashas Shetty, I guess you know him.5 I felt India is so big and so connected that it is possible and no one does this. My friend told me about Yashas. I played there but it was difficult to organise anything in India. It is sometimes a bit complicated and I experienced the same in Dhaka. I wanted to go to Pakistan but I could not get the Visa on time so I skipped Pakistan. But I know it is also a bit messy at some point. I also met people out there; I know people in Kolkata, I know people in New Delhi, but I felt I needed to know more. I think it is since the last few years that maybe the door has opened for me to see what was really going on in India. To me that has always been difficult to find out because I would find somebody in a city and all of them would tell me ‘I don’t know anyone else, anywhere else in India’. I would say, ‘Come on, there are people of course, you are not the only one here, that’s not possible’. And that pushed me to travel. When people tell me there is nothing or little, I always think, ‘I don’t trust you. I prefer to see them with my own eyes and ears’. And then I always hope to connect with people; it is very important for me to connect with people. It is also important to check how people work in their own environment, which is not necessarily similar to our environment out here. You cannot really find differences between countries in Europe anyway. Then once you are there, it is also interesting to see how they arrived there, 5  Yashas Shetty is an Indian contemporary artist who recently founded the Indian Sonic Research Organization (ISRO)

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how did they discover this? Then you realise that some people, thanks to the Internet or because they have lived abroad, started to do sound art but some people just take up the idea like this, you know. Somebody who just wanted to explore new tonalities, build new instruments or just play with the sound. There is sometimes a bit of an accident as well, it is like the story of KONONO NO.1 in the Congo, do you know them? They were presented like the Einstürzende Neubauten of the Congo. I thought this is nonsense, this is traditional music and that’s it but the fact that they amplify their music through DIY processes makes their sound very unique. This may sound experimental to somebody here, but it is not experimental to them, it is just traditional. But then some people are triggered by these kinds of things, which I find interesting. Locally sometimes people think, ‘Oh yeah, if I do this I could explore the sound more and not necessarily go on with the traditional practices’. There is this label in Indonesia and Bali called Insitu Recordings and they publish contemporary gamelan music, put some very interesting gamelan compositions and there is a composer who uses bowed Gamelan which is interesting, instead of beating it. In that sense, it is a purely experimental practice to me. I am sure there is no influence of European musical or sonic practices and that is also what I find very interesting. BC: Yes, exactly. CF: I mean I don’t want to say it is wrong to be influenced by European practices. It is not about that; it’s proof to me that this sound exploration is a worldwide phenomenon. I also see especially in East and South-East Asia that the field recording practice is very strong and big. In Taiwan, in China, Indonesia step by step as well, and in Vietnam. This is very interesting because the way I work is not necessarily through the same process through which we listen, because the context is different; I mean it sounds different there, that’s it. The way many people compose in parts of Asia, a bit in Malaysia, in China, and especially in Japan to me can be very different from what we do in Europe. The importance of quietness and silence, time, are very different in the films as well. Many films from South Korea and Japan convey slowness and contemplation. That is something we don’t necessarily or easily find here. It depends on the composer of course, and this is why I find the sound art practice there very interesting. For example Yan Jun and other people also

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grab a lot from the performance art, which I rarely do on my side. I explored this way a lot over there. I must also say that I have explored less of the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. I was supposed to go to Central Asia this year but it’s over. Because with the Middle East, it depends on where you want to go; either you go to the Gulf countries where almost nothing happens, part of the Emirates, a tiny bit in Kuwait now, and in Bahrain through Hasan Hujairi.6 Do you know him? Then you need to go to Lebanon, Syria, but then it is war and it is difficult; Iran is now a bit easier. And in Africa, it is also expensive to travel throughout Africa. BC: When it comes to tradition, is there a very complex relationship with tradition, canonical sounds for example, as you already mentioned? For example, in Africa, polyrhythmic sound might be a cliché but it is at the core of a tradition. Then there are temporal and microtonal experiments in South Asian music. CF: Yeah, I guess I am a bit influenced but I should really study it, which I basically never did partly due to a lack of time. It is very complex in the end, especially if you speak about the Gamelan ensemble for example, but not only in that one anyway. But if I attend traditional music or classical music concerts from Asia, I try to look at the players, how they play, and how they hold the instruments—if it is hanging in the air or if they take it in their hand. How they change the tonality of the sound. In the end, it is not experimental, it is very classical or traditional but you can try to experiment with it later or not use it in the proper way, which I often do. Like bowing a gong for example. BC: That’s experimental sound practice. CF: Yeah, or putting seeds or rice in the Singing Bowl, on a Cymbal or on a Gong and beating; not only having the resonance of the Gong but having those little sounds which are created. BC: Textures. CF: Yeah, textures exactly. I tried to explore this but now and then, I collaborated with traditional musicians as well, especially in Laos more than anywhere else. I have been trying to collaborate and ­create a new structure and new way of listening and exploring 6  Hasan Hujairi (b. 1982) is a Bahraini artist, composer, and writer. His work explores the notion of the outsider, confronting (historiographic) superstructures, and the nature of constructing narratives within time.

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sound. But in Laos, it’s a bit complicated because they really tend to stick to the tradition so in the end, you end up following them more than anything else. But in Myanmar, we made a performance with musicians from Japan, Myanmar, Cambodia, Serbia and myself using electronics, violin, Gongs, saxophone and so on. And that’s why it was very interesting because it was more related to free improvised music; it was very noisy sometimes. It was interesting to see how people would react—the musicians and the audience as well. In fact I loved the open-mindedness of the audience who were much more open than here in Europe, I would say. I performed once with a traditional musician (Ko Doo) in Myanmar as well and it was a pleasure because he was 50 years old back then (so older than me), and I was surprised to find somebody so old to tell me ‘I love to experiment. I use traditional instruments but I don’t always play them in that traditional way. So we should play together’. I was so happy because I would say it is rare, especially in a country that is isolated because of a political regime that prevents people from having access to the external world, especially back then. Now it is different. It was a pleasure because he would listen to what I did and vice versa. So we could tweak Burmese music in a way and that was very interesting to me. It was sounding Burmese, but it was not purely Burmese and that was interesting. Yeah, of course I listen to the so-called traditional music from different parts of the world (not everywhere), but I don’t read enough about it. I don’t fully understand everything; this is something I am lacking. I might read or not, I still don’t know because I have so many books to read among other things. I should stay somewhere and learn, for example, instruments or ways to play or ways of building beats and so on, which right now I cannot as I am basically too busy with other things. BC: Historically, ‘sound art’ has been defined in terms of a deliberate experimentation and exploration of the layered relationship between sound and space to produce an art object, experience, or event such as an exhibition or an album or a durational performance piece. This definition of ‘sound art’ is very European, by joining art and sound. But sound is part of everyday life in the ‘non-West’, for example, in India, Bangladesh, South-East Asia and Africa, people are continuously engaging with sound in everyday situations but when sound is connected with art objects for con-

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sumption, there is some sort of framing going on, the way philosophers such as Christoph Cox theorise it.7 That framing becomes an artistic disembedding of sound. Don’t you think that when we put this frame on non-Western sound practices and try to define it through the ears of the Eurocentric understanding of ‘sound art’, there is a problem? CF: Maybe, yes. I cannot fully answer this, but I wrote the book Noise in South East Asia,8 with Dimitri della Faille, and I wrote an essay about sound art in Eastern and South-East Asia.9 I don’t know if you have read it. At some point in that, I speak about the Japanese garden, which is to me a piece of art that may not be so for people in Japan. I don’t really know, but somehow for me it is, I guess. It is not only about the visual aspect of the garden, but also the sound; they don’t do it randomly. There is an artistic practice or a traditional practice in building a Japanese garden in a certain way, to have these kinds of sounds. I guess there is in parts of Japan and China (because the Japanese garden comes somehow from Chinese influences) a form of sound practice that has never been called ‘sound art’ like this for sure. Now, of course, the West is always defining a lot of things, maybe not giving a voice to the concerned people. But I cannot answer your question. I cannot tell if it is wrong or if it is good or not. I think it would be better to ask the people living there if they agree with the fact that they are doing sound art (or not), but again I think it would depend on the country, because in China so many people say that they practice sound art even when it is not sound art to me. It has become a common word in China, but it is not necessarily the word I hear in India. There must be some, but it is not as common as it is in China. BC: And in Africa? Is ‘sound art’ a term that is used or is ‘experimental music’ more common? CF: I think it is more experimental music that is used there. I don’t remember what I heard, but in Egypt I have heard sound art. Yes, 7  See for reference, Cox, C. (2009). “Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious”. Organised Sound 14/1: 19–26. 8  Fermont, Cedrik & Faille, Dimitri della (2016). Not Your World Music: Noise in South East Asia. Berlin: Syrphe. 9  Fermont, Cedrik (2020). “Sound Art in East and Southeast Asia. Historical and Political Considerations” in Sanne Krogh Groth & Holger Schulze (eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook Of Sound Art: New York: Bloomsbury.

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in Egypt, I knew a few people who claimed to do audio-visual art and sound art, along with some installations. Maybe Joseph (Kamaru) would use these terms; I don’t know, we should ask him. But mostly it is experimental music. Like in many of the places, people tend to use the term ‘experimental music’, which is to me a bit problematic. In most cases what people call experimental is not experimental music to me because it is not experimenting. I think nowadays it is very difficult to do experimental things. I am sure that when Russolo did it in 1913, that was purely experimental. And what Cage did in the 1930s was experimental. Halim El-Dabh did an experiment in 1944 and for sure, I agree with this. But nowadays to me you must be super inventive to do something experimental. It is a word that I use because if I speak about electro-acoustic, or acousmatic concepts people tell me ‘I don’t know what it is’. So I say ‘experimental’ and they kind of figure out, more or less, about what it can be. Nonetheless, I really don’t believe much in this term. Maybe you can have an experimental practice. I have experimented a lot with sound and in the end, I realise ‘oh yeah, this person did it before me and I wasn’t aware’. Maybe it is problematic, I don’t know. But is the term ‘sound art’ being imposed or not is the sole question. Do people accept the fact that an artist from India, for example, says that ‘This is not sound art that I do, this is whatever it is’. I don’t know if it is that important or not. I think these aren’t just words that can be interpreted in a different way according to the context. Some people tell me that they do noise; for example, we discussed that in our book The Notion of Noise Music. Some are doing noises, the noise we know, Merzbow, Whitehouse, etc., but then some other people would do something that I don’t consider to be noise music. They tell me ‘This is what I call noise music’, and to me it is not—it is okay, it is fair enough. It is not my definition, it is your definition because it is your context, your history is different and what you listen to is also different, so it is okay with me. I like to define things and put them in context, but sometimes it is difficult. You can hardly have a universal definition even inside Western music practices; there are disagreements. What we call Industrial music in Europe, for example, is Einstürzende Neubauten, SPK, Throbbing Gristle, Test ­Department and so on. But then in the USA, they would put a guitar with electronics, and claim Nine Inch Nails is industrial music, or Ministry is

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industrial music. I would think, ‘Well, to me it is not industrial music at all’. So there will always be disagreements anyway, but we need to find ways to understand each other. I think nobody should be forced to adopt a terminology if they think something is not sound art, it is something else, and they explain to you why. I think justification is okay, fair, intelligent, whatever; I think, ‘Yeah, okay this is another option, of course.’ And especially as you say in the context of parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, their way of listening is very different and the way their music is played is also very different. Their history is different, so the definition cannot necessarily be similar to the one here. I am thinking especially about the fact that sound art is partly connected to Cinema and Electro-acoustic music at some point. For example, you see that something is from Asia like Nam June Paik who did Musique concrète but he comes from video art mostly and Fluxus related things, more than purely the sound and music itself. Or Walter Ruttmann who was in the end an experimental filmmaker more than a sound artist, even though he did some Musique concrète. Before Musique concrète, he did sound art. Was it called sound art or Musique concrète back then? No, it wasn’t. When you see the first Soviet experiments with synthetic music, some of them were sound art, but to them those were experiments that would lead them to something further. I don’t think there is any purely universal definition. BC: But when you frame it with a particular definition and say that this is sound art, this is not, then there is a violence involved. I will just give one example: 72 Maqāms were practised in Lebanon and in Middle Eastern music, Arabic music traditions (Maqāms are intricate tone structures). When one of the earliest European documentations on Middle Eastern music was being done by a colonial musicologist back in the 1600s, he was reducing 72 into 12 because he couldn’t appreciate the intricacies of the system. That is the Western colonial ear. This is a colonial violence on a particular local sonic structure. I was wondering if you came across something like this. I mean of course we can always encounter colonisation that distorted a particular refined expression of sound into something objectified and it is always happening. CF: Of course, you have it if you consider synthesizers. Synthesizers are tuned according to the Western scale. It is changing very slowly. Now one can micro-tune some Korg synths. Then you have the

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analogue synth, where you can tweak even more. And there were experiments in Iran as well. I think it’s Alireza Mashayekhi if I am not wrong (I think I may be wrong), who did some Persian tuning and Persian scales with synth and it also happened in Indonesia around the 60s and 70s. But I don’t remember if it’s Slamet Abdul Sjukur or another composer who had a project called Gameltron.10 The synth has been imposed like this; even though most of them have been built in Japan, they have been made with this Western scale. Though you can tweak it, it’s difficult, like the Electro Chaabi in Egypt. You need to play it and tune it by yourself live. It’s a bit complicated. There is a composer from Iraq who is working on a project on this issue. BC: Khyam Allami. CF: You know him of course.11 This might change in ages or simply some people will do it by themselves in the end. I find it interesting that some contemporary composers have been influenced by some of these traditions, originally in the nineteenth century. If we speak about the electro-acoustic and the first experiments, back then the electronic music world was supposed to be more open minded and eager to discover new ways of playing even classical music through dodecaphony, for example. But it never led so far in the end, apart from just thinking ‘Okay, let’s just produce those synths or instruments or whatever computer software that can deal with this scale and that scale’. So I hear people talking about it but it is very slow, and usually it is people from there, and there are some people here as well, but I think it is still less. Yeah, of course, it’s a very complicated relationship, but I often think that it might have been like this with any civilisation. The thing is that Europeans were the ones who did it the latest and in the most violent way and really invaded everywhere. Because when you think about it, for example, even the Ottomans brought some instruments to Bulgaria and Serbia. Even the Zurna, you find it with another name over there as well. In a way, they also changed the way of playing over there, probably 10  Adhi Susanto; one other development of note was Adhi Susanto’s creation of two electronic devices to perform Indonesian music: Gamelan Symphony (1976), as he put it—’a system of electronic equipment to produce the live gamelan sound like a symphonic sound’ and Gameltron (1978), an electronic gamelan, a ‘keyboard with an analog system, to play Javanese music’: https://econtact.ca/11_3/indonesia_gluck.html 11  This book includes an in-depth conversation with Khyam Allami.

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not as violently as what it is like in the West. Yeah, it is definitely a very complicated relationship. The West deconstructed everything through atonalities and purely experimental music and brought that a bit everywhere. Many people embraced this outside of Western practices. But I see more and more local people re-­ appropriating this culture. I would say it is very strong especially in Indonesia where people are playing with their own self-made instruments, self-made tuning, ways of listening and engaging with the audience as well. Because you don’t engage with the audience in Indonesia as you do out here. It’s a very different way of attending, listening and also mixing music genres; these are art practices that you would hardly see here. I did a performance in a place where there was a folk artist—a singer/songwriter, there was a sound artist playing with machines he had built himself, there would be a punk band, there would be some local person from the village playing their traditional music and then there would be me. You will rarely see such a mix in such a context out here. I also think that the sound or noise itself is not necessarily problematic in some countries; people will push it to use it like with the Kalimba or Likembe, for example.12 In the past, people were looking for the purest sound ever in Europe—whether it was the cello or piano or whatever, it had to be perfectly pure with no disturbances or cracks or anything of that kind. But there, an accident is fine. I experienced it once when I played in Laos with a traditional musician and a toad was making noises. Sometimes when we were playing, the toad became part of the musical piece while in Europe, I guess in a very classical context people would go mad and just kick the animal out of the place. But then that was not sound art for people in Laos, but a part of the context; that’s it. BC: I was thinking of three different parameters. One is time/temporality—the way time is responded to in sound practice. Another is space: sonic perspectives, the distance between sound and listening, the way you conceptualise space for example. And thirdly, the self or subjectivity: where the artist is posited and what the relationship with the audience is. In Western music, there is a very large distance between the performer and the audience, but in South Asian, African and Middle Eastern music, generally the performer and the  Kalimba is an African musical instrument with a wooden soundboard and metal keys.

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audience are intimately connected. Without the existence of the audience, performance will not take place; it happens because of the continuous response that you make to the presence of the audience. These are the questions that I have in my theorising process and in hypothesising the sound practices in the Global South. How is it different in the Global South, which shares a colonial history to respond to the idea of time, and whether the sense of time is convoluted or distorted and disturbed by the Western sense of time. Also in terms of spatiality if you go back to visual art or painting, perspective is so different in different cultures. CF: Changes happened in (sonic) perspectives between the Middle Ages and now. BC: Yes, in sound, of course, there is perspective. How is it negotiated when you think of an uncontaminated expression of sound, pre-­ modern forms of sound production, and then the fact that colonial modernity was forced on many parts of the Global South. There is a commonality in the Global South and the way in which this modernist technological approach was forced on the local and traditional sound practices of the Middle East, India and South Asia also on South-East Asia by the colonial Dutch, and European forces in Africa since the 1500s, and earlier in Latin America. The Global South has a common history of being colonial subjects. CF: Yeah, I will say that even in Europe at some point if you go out of the urban context, the local traditional music also had a connection with the people. It has been repressed or suppressed (although not officially) also and considered ‘not intellectual enough’. I think a similar history occurred here but in a different context and more slowly. I would say that it is interesting to see this commonality that you find in non-academic music here like punk, rock, metal or techno, which are not mainstream in the free parties where there is no real distance between the DJ, the musicians and the audience. It even happens sometimes with some free improve, noise and experimental music practices here where you have a musician who is not on stage but in the middle of the room and people are surrounding this person. Of course, you see it more in parts of Asia, Africa and so on, but you see it here sometimes as well. I will tell you a story regarding this distance and the importance of some characters in an orchestra in Europe: I performed at a fes-

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tival in Luxembourg with an ensemble called Salim’s Salon, and this initially was a project developed by Hannes Seidl, and we were— apart from Hannes—four people of African descent in a way or another. Seth Ayyaz, who you may know from the UK, is partly of Mauritian-Indian descent. Jacqueline George is from Cairo and Elsa Mbala from Cameroon is living here now and I am partly from the Congo, and we have attended some other concerts of modern classical music.13 So there’s this stage, which is high, and you sit lower with a certain distance. Then you have the star coming (the violin player)—it is an ensemble but the main people are the violinist and the conductor of course. By the end of the concert, the violinist was invited to greet everybody; everybody would applaud, but nobody would celebrate the other musicians. It was like those two were the stars (the conductor, the first violin), and Jacqueline told me ‘So what? Are the others non-existent?’ They were put out of context all of a sudden. Of course, they didn’t compose the music, but they were part of the music performance; the composer can put down a sheet of paper but without musicians the music will not be heard. It’s like celebrating an architect but not celebrating the workers who built the building. Because you can be an architect, you may have studied and been a genius but you should celebrate everybody. Jacqueline was shocked because in the Egyptian context of course, it doesn’t work like this. There, everybody plays and everybody is a part of it and so it makes sense that everybody should be really celebrated, respected, congratulated. But in this case, it wasn’t so. This very classical or so-called modern classical music context is still stuck in these roles, in these structures, which are problematic to me. I hope it’s going to change but it’s going to take a long time. I don’t know how it works in Asia when it comes to a very classical music concert. I have seen videos where the European structure was copied in a venue. I also attended one in Vietnam but that to me was a nightmare. It was very difficult. The performance had modern compositions from electro-acoustic to a mix of Western, Vietnamese classical music and traditional music, and the audiences were there only to show up—most of them. So they were on the phone, they were talking; they were having con13  Read Elsa Mbala’s interview in Carlyle, Angus and Lane, Cathy (2021).Sound Arts Now. London: Uniformbooks.

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versations, getting texts. It was noisy and I was going mad. I found it totally disrespectful for the artists who were playing because almost nobody really cared. It was like being in a traditional music concert outdoors where people were just having fun, except that the context was different. It was in a closed venue, we were in a sitting position, etc. Well it was weird for me. In the end, I was just wondering why people were attending, because they would not understand the music. Some came because they knew the musicians, some came just to show up. Although there were people listening, they were a minority in the end. So apparently in some contexts, this way of organising a concert is not compatible, for sure. Of course you could say it’s bringing Western practices there, but on the other hand, the musicians were Vietnamese people, and they have chosen to study this kind of music and composition. And their compositions were not purely Western compositions; they had a very strong Vietnamese influence. Not all of them would have been easy to set up outside as I told you about the distance, which is very close in most contexts, and so depending on where it is played, it can be different. But again it also depends on context; religious music in some countries like Tibet or Nepal can take place in a close environment, or Buddhist music in Singapore could also be in close or semi close environment, or like in India, celebrations can be between walls where there is no roof, but it is a kind of close environment. Here again the distance between the audience and the musicians is very narrow. It is not always like this in Buddhist contexts. There can be a gradation because the monk is kind of a superior person, it can be different and you also cannot sit next to the horn otherwise you’ll be deaf. You have to keep a certain distance. Then you also have practices where people move. If we speak about celebrations in Korea, Japan and China, you have these people beating drums and Gongs, but it is part of a performance in that context—they move like a brass band would move here as well. I think there is some energy in a way. According to the place, I also encountered different ways of listening and accepting the fact that somebody is on the stage or not; depending on the country or the culture, depending on the social context—urban area or non-­ urban area. BC: What are the differences that you find? CF: Once it is in an urban area people are often more connected to

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BC: CF: BC: CF: BC:

other practices. It also deeply depends on the geography and so they would find it okay to see somebody on stage just because it is Westernised in the end. But you would find it less in villages, for example, and what I realised is that in some villages in South East Asia like in Cambodia (but you also find that in North Africa and in the Middle East as well), the volume of the music when it is amplified is insane to me. It is so loud that it sometimes hurts the ears, and it’s so distorted. This is something that I find interesting because to them the purity of the sound doesn’t really matter. I was close to a wedding in a Cambodian village and I thought the music sounded like Industrial music. It was so distorted and I found it interesting because there is a certain acceptance of radical music in many Asian countries, like Industrial music or noise music, for example. The purity of sound is not very important. Maybe people would not run away if we do these distorted beats. To me the Chinese context was different or even Taiwanese. But in Cambodia it was loud. India too. Yeah, that’s true. It is very loud over there. And distorted. And in many Arab countries too. Why is it that? Is it because the distortion and noise is accepted in a social structure? I suppose so. I never really found a proper answer but indeed the accidental distortions are accepted for sure. My theory is that it’s closer to nature. Well, of course, it is. It is close to nature since it has many aberrations. Nature can accommodate all the mistakes and errors. Mistakes and errors are not defined as such, because nature is still nature, it is not transformed into culture. When you transform it into culture, then there are definitions like—this is noise but this is not. Yes. In Western practices, we started to put everything in a box, play indoors in a quieter place, play tapes or CDs at home with good speakers and closed windows to avoid any disturbance. How do you like to identify yourself as an artist with a distinct cultural background? Because you have a very complex background, lots of travelling, and curiosities have led you to explore different kinds of traditional and other kinds of music, thus getting influ-

CF: BC: CF: BC:

CF: BC:

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enced by various forms and genres; it is a complex issue. CF: What a difficult question! I think I never fully identify myself but some people do it for me. They put me in a box but the box is often different. Sometimes I find it interesting but sometimes frustrating, depending on what the person says and considers. Obviously I am a composer and musician without really defining what kind of music or art forms I do unless the person asks me. Since there are so many things that I do, I make it simple. Like I told you, experimental, sound art and electronic music are not mainstream for people to understand what it is. But I guess I am an archivist at some point as well because I tend to try to find as much information as I can from all those places—not only Africa and Asia. I write about it and I tend to buy a lot of music from either those places or from the past from here; lots of such things. Because I like this kind of music and I am always afraid that it could be lost at some point. In that way, I am probably a Westerner because of my fear of losing traces of the past and losing parts of a culture. And, of course, the need to write about it is somehow pretty much from the West, but I am defining myself as a mixed person as well at many levels: culturally speaking I am more of a North European person than anything else, but I am partly a Congolese as well because of the fact that I was born in the Congo and left pretty soon. I grew up in a partly Congolese family; I have eaten Congolese food, I have heard Swahili, I have met family members; I have heard Zouk music and stuff like this, so it is also part of me. It’s a smaller part for sure but the fact that when I was young, there were very few Africans in school had a very strong impact on me, because most students accepted me but some would not, so there was racism. Then when you are confronted with racism, you try to figure out and understand where you come from, why you are there and what is the community or culture you belong to. When you are a child or teenager, it is not always easy. In the end, some people at present times would define me as an artist of African descent although it is not only Africa, I am of Belgian and Greek descent as well, and that’s why it is complicated. It was written on my passport that I was born in Lubumbashi and I know I lived in Kinshasa. But I realise in some cases I have the feeling that it is because it’s a trend right now. I don’t know whether it is bad or good, it is both probably, but it emerges from the fact that they need to show, ‘Okay, there is this

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person partly from that place and we need to speak about this person because right now we have all these issues regarding colonialism, post-colonialism among many other things’. But I think above all I should be invited for what I do, not for exoticism. Even though in most cases I think it is not exoticism, I suspect sometimes there is a bit of it. I still remember when I lived in the Netherlands, people on flyers would write that I am from Belgium, because I was the foreigner who had come there. If I go somewhere else I would be, maybe a Congolese Belgian. Maybe I will always be ‘the foreigner’. Anyway, almost funnily, I am not seen like that in Indonesia because when I am in Indonesia, many people think that I am from there; that’s interesting. Some people see me as a nomad, but I always say that I am not a nomad, I could be a semi-nomad. I am not a nomadic person because I have a home where I come back and I miss it when I am away from it for too long. So in the end when I mix all these things, it is hard for me to define myself. Am I a Congolese-Belgian semi-nomadic person living in Germany? So again I am an absolute foreigner everywhere. If I go to Africa (North Africa is a bit different), some people can think I am an Arab sometimes because I am light brown more or less. But if I am in Sub-Saharan Africa, except in this particularly South African context, if I am in Uganda, most people will immediately see that this is a foreigner because of the way he looks and his skin is also lighter brown than theirs. It even happened once that a person stopped me in the street and said, ‘Hello sir, may I talk to you? From which tribe are you?’ and he thought I was from one of the tribes he didn’t know in the country. I thought that was interesting. On average, they think I’m a foreigner but when people talk to me and ask me where I was born, where I come from, and so on, if they hear that I was born in Zaire, they feel ‘you are one of us’. This is something I came across many times in Kenya, in Uganda, among all the Congolese I met over there—‘Oh! You are a brother, you are with us. You were born in Lubumbashi. So you are an African’. I think that’s interesting because here I have heard people telling me and even friends sometimes, ‘Well, you are not an African because you only lived there for two years. Your culture is here’. In the end, I am nothing or everything at once. BC: Working as an artist with sound, do you identify with a particular tradition or is there no tradition at all?

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No, I indeed find myself as somebody in between, and as what I am really since I discovered experimental music, industrial, and electronic body music (EBM) through friends and through radio shows and in totally DIY, non-academic ways. When I was a teenager, even though back then I was studying orchestral drums and singing, it was more classical music. I started to document more academic practices and went to study in a Conservatory and also learned about sound art in an art school that I attended for one year. I came from a DIY background and ended up in an academic setup, but never entirely fit in any of them. I do purely electro-­ acoustic music in an academic way but I also do harsh noise or I mix them and I have a foot in both worlds. I can be invited for a festival like the Darmstadter Ferienkurse that is more academic, or like Stockhausen New Music School, and then I would also be playing in a squat somewhere or in a totally DIY place in Indonesia. I find it comfortable to be in between. I don’t want to belong to one community or the other. To me, it’s not important because both have their own problems and their own rejections as well. There are some independent people who would totally reject academia—the same academia which totally ignores the plebs that are do-it-­ yourself. And I am against this. I mean in the end, we are all doing some so-called sound art or experimental music—we have different practices, different ways of doing it, may be different results (but not always) and different qualities, but my problem with a part of academia is the feeling of superiority in some cases. I don’t agree with the thinking that we do it better because of the historical background/studies because there are also so many clichés in academia. There are so many clichés in this electro-acoustic music circle that I think—‘I mean, come on guys, it’s not possible that you are still doing this after so many decades’. I think no one is better or inferior to anyone. I always prefer to be in between all these practices. But yeah there might be one definition. I can tell you that I am an independent person. I don’t systematically rely on grants, university or community. I have often been alone basically; travelling alone, composing alone, even though I have some bands and I work in duos and trios here in Berlin as well, and the research I started to do was also alone. Sometimes I travel for six months alone, collecting alone and writing alone. Even though I wrote this book with Dimitri, it was a collaborative work. So yeah, ‘indepen-

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dent’ is maybe how I would define myself. Independent in the music I want to do because I do too many things. Independent in the way I work, which is not purely academic because I didn’t study how to write a book, for example. And as I compose electro-­ acoustic music after having learnt by myself by just experimenting on cassettes. I am an independent person in between many worlds. Maybe I could define myself like this. BC: Do you ever find an inner urge to connect with a traditional trajectory and feeling of root? Take me for an example: after working for 10 to 12 years with sound, now I am feeling a need to find some historical context within which I exist. There were multitudes of influences, but I am looking for a traditional root because of the racism I faced in Europe, because of the clichés that I was subjected to. Through these processes, I came to this question of who I am and which tradition I belong to. Am I as free as I think I am? Is there a need for self-determination to resist any kind of cliché and racial discrimination? Often we are lost in the face of a hierarchical model in Europe as immigrant artists. As someone working with sound, I always felt like I was eaten up by European coinages, jargons, concepts and definitions. Who am I? CF: To me it is a bit different because I grew up here in this European context, in a multi-cultural society in Belgium, which is more multicultural than Germany in a way partly because Germany lost its colonies. I never really felt the need to connect to certain African traditions. It’s because in my family they never seemed to be connected to traditional music but more to popular music influenced by European culture like Zouk, for example, or maybe the Congolese Rumba which is, of course, connected to a certain kind of tradition, but it’s not really my thing. I have been more attracted to traditional practices from some Eastern Asian countries more than anything else. I cannot explain why; it’s my taste and there is a hidden reason I guess. It touches me really deeply when I hear some Gagaku music from Japan or Gamelan even though many people in Indonesia say to me that there is not just Gamelan. Then I say, ‘Yeah I know there are other practices but for me it’s this one’. The sound, the beat and the rhythm, how it’s done is amazing. If I am to be inspired by some music from Laos, for example, I think I would grab it from there because it deeply touches me for reasons I don’t really understand, but I would not like to simply steal it or

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whatever. I receive influences from everything and nothing. But that doesn’t mean I would never identify some of my music with some African rhythmical practices because I know that in this modern bass music that is played in parts of Africa like in Kenya, Uganda and the Congo, there are things that I find amazing too, like the way they build the rhythm which is not a typical European 4/4. That is something I like as well. But then to me it will be important to recognise the fact that if I find something interesting and do it, then my inspiration was from there. It is not like the colonialist’s mindset of thinking ‘Well I have got this idea to do this because it has been invented there (not in Europe)’. This way of composing electronic music is very typically from non-West, and it is very interesting. But I don’t want to make a copy and I would also like not to be the one who steals or to be the one who says, ‘Oh yeah you are from Africa that is why you do this’. It’s a bit ridiculous. This is something I faced a lot with the first compilation I published ‘Beyond Ignorance and Borders’ on Syrphe. It was definitely the first time I solely put out a compilation of electronic and experimental music, sound art and electronica from Asia, Middle East and Africa (Global South). And many comments I heard were, ‘Well, they sound like us. Actually I cannot identify which country they are from. What’s the point?’ I find these comments terrible. In many people’s minds, a Burmese artist should sound Burmese, if it is an Indian artist, then it should sound like Indian (if it means anything anyway). I have always told them ‘Listen, are you expecting a Scottish sound artist to perform with a bagpipe, you aren’t’. If a person does it, it is wonderful, but it should not be a rule, this is stupid, it doesn’t make any sense. It is hard to not fall into a cliché when you start to do something connected to your roots, I think. This is, of course, okay if you want to do it. I totally find it wonderful. For example, Senyawa in Indonesia are doing this modern Rock-ish music, which is deeply rooted to Indonesian culture and it’s amazing. Hence, also maybe they are successful, they are not the only ones to do that there, but they have been picked and that is great! But again there is a bit of exoticism in this. I don’t know if it is a bad or good thing. Many of my friends would term ‘exoticism’ as bad, I also really don’t think it is correct. On the other hand maybe it can trigger something and push people to think otherwise and see that they also do this, they have their own way of

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dealing with this, we have been ignoring this and it is wrong. It’s actually hard to say ‘why not’, unfortunately. Even if you are getting invited sometimes to perform, you wonder if this person is really enjoying what you do—trying to push boundaries and open people’s ears, or if this person is just exploiting this issue right now because it brings a lot of people and money. So you become a bit paranoid with these kinds of things, it is difficult. I try not to be but the connection with tradition for me is a bit difficult because I spend my time deconstructing classical and traditional aspects of European music. So what I do is something which a classical musician will not do in theory. I have spent my life deconstructing things like this, to misuse instruments, for example. If I had to connect to another tradition, I should also dismantle it and not just copy. I have a daf—this drum—for example. I can play a bit of it but I also try to use it in a non-orthodox way. I try to get new sounds, put a distortion, or put some objects into this daf, but not in comparison to what a European sound artist would do. It’s just me, myself and I—that’s it. I am not thinking I want to be like this artist. Traditions can be interesting, but I find them oppressive in general after a while, and they are never really purely traditional because what we call traditional music now whether it comes from Britany or from Bangalore, if you had visited the same place 500 years ago or 1000 years ago, this so-called traditional music was not exactly like this. It was mostly oral tradition. So it changes, new patterns are being created. Incidentally or not, but there is an evolution or whatever we can call it. So I sometimes used so-called traditional instruments in my music but I never ended up using them in a so-called proper way. In most cases, I can’t play them. I have a duo here with Marie Takahashi, from Japan. She plays viola and I play gongs. You don’t put viola with gongs certainly. But it works and I like it, we liked it. I don’t play it in a traditional way. I like blending things maybe because I am a mixed being myself, I don’t know. I have always been blending things, sounds, cultures, the purely academic with the non-academic, the punk influence with the experimental influence and also the traditional sounds with electronics. This is again because I love sound. I want to try to make new connections and new tones, and new results. BC: When it comes to the understanding of Global South artists compared to Europeans, do you find they are fundamentally different in

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their approach to sound and listening, or they are just like any one of us? CF: No, there are differences of course, sure. BC: In which way? CF: In the different ways of listening and composing, if I go back to China, Japan, South Korea, India. BC: South-East Asia. CF: Partly; in Malaysia for example. BC: Africa. CF: There it is different. I am conscious about the traditional ways of playing sounds and listening. This purity of sound using a tone, using single notes here and there. I was telling you earlier about the blank parts, the silence. It is peaceful, it’s very quiet. Not all of them; you can sometimes find faster beats, noisy beats in Korean music as well. But that is something I haven’t found until now in Africa or Latin America, for example. So I guess it is possibly connected in a way or another to some traditions in classical music out there (I mean court music in Japan, Korea, China and so on). But I can’t be sure, I haven’t found any answer. On the other hand I realised some common patterns between some Chinese music and some Eastern African music, but it is not ‘sound art’. It is this bass music, rhythmical music influenced by techno and dubstep, but it is neither techno nor dubstep. It is their own new genre. One day I was listening to some of these artists and I felt that’s very interesting because this Kenyan artist and this Ugandan artist sounded like some of the Chinese artists I know. And then when I saw one of these Chinese artists and one of the Kenyan artists together live (Hyph11E and Slikback), I found that very interesting because they were creating their own new genre which doesn’t exist here in the West. The way they make the beats is also kind of minimalistic. It is bass music, but not the same one that we do here. This happened twice in two different spots like what happened with Dada in Switzerland and the USA and with punk in the USA and London with actually no direct connections despite happening at the same time. In Indonesia, you see a lot of people building their own instruments; electronic or not doesn’t matter. This is a practice that you can find in Africa but for different reasons. In Africa, you find people who cannot afford to buy an instrument so they build it by themselves and that leads to very interesting experiments. In

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Indonesia or the Philippines, we also have people building their own electronic circuits because they cannot afford the prices we pay here. But the music tradition is much stronger in Indonesia—much stronger than here. Almost everybody plays music. It’s the case in some parts of Africa as well. You go to some village and there is not one single person who cannot play an instrument or sing at least. I suppose their practice might be connected to this. But it is becoming blurry as well because more and more people travel even from the Global South. It is becoming a bit easier and there is also an elite there like everywhere. Even when people cannot travel they have the Internet. Even in countries where people are not wealthy, they use mobile phones, so sounds circulate all the time. BC: Sound travels all the time. CF: Yeah, exactly. It means that our influences come from everywhere now. We can’t escape them anymore. Anything including a film score, the sounds in a film and all the field recordings can be found online on Freesound, for example. All the musicians who travel and meet people who are into some kind of contemporary music almost everywhere you go will have a kind of common ground at some point, with exceptions. Partly through colonialism because they would tell you they know Stockhausen and Schaeffer but we (Westerners) often don’t know their own local composers from that time. I see more and more Europeans also being influenced and doing music that resembles music from other places and inside the continent as well. For example, in Africa there is this genre called Gqom from South Africa.14 It is quite popular, and there is someone from Cameroon who would say ‘Hey listen, I am doing this kind of music now’, and he is doing Gqom. I thought it’s great to see it transporting itself, slowly. It is not limited to a certain region anymore thanks to the internet. It goes so fast right now. I don’t really speak about Latin America because I know less about it and because the European influence has been extremely strong and so has the American influence too. You had electro-acoustic in the 50s and 60s even in Cuba. Even though most people don’t know about them here except for a few big names, it has been there very well as it has in Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Chile—so the 14  Gqom is a genre of electronic dance music that emerged in the early 2010s from Durban, South Africa, pioneered largely by producer DJ Lag among others.

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context of Latin America is very different even though they suffered a lot through colonialism and all the coups. But it’s not the same compared to parts of Asia I would say, because Asia is so vast. Central Asia has got another influence through the Soviet Union and Russia. There are things happening in there and their history is completely different. You also have the older influences that are there back in Iran while you find almost no sound art in the Gulf countries; you find so much in Iran or at least ambient, dark ambient, that can be considered ‘sound art’. I suspect there is a very old music tradition, very deeply rooted and very strong culture in Iran which the Gulf countries don’t have to offer. There are things that are lost also sometimes, or cut off from the past. For example, these composers of India in the late 60s or early 70s were seen on the BBC, for example. I have never heard about those people.15 It is interesting to see that there is a gap and that happens in many places too. In Iran, in the 60s and 70s, for example, there was Alireza Mashayekhi, Dariush Dolat Shahi, and in the 70s, it went a bit further; they were not the only ones. Then there was the Islamic revolution and it was over and there is this gap between generations and many Iranians had never heard about them ten years ago. There is no continuation; it is not a straight line. It takes other paths and other influences and goes via the diaspora that brings something back sometimes. It is interesting to see people from the diaspora revisiting a country or moving back to the country and bringing/taking bits and creating something completely new; that is also very interesting to me. Back in London, in the 90s, there was an Indian and Pakistani scene connected to jungle, drum and bass and trip-hop, but with their way of composing, their own way of doing sound. I think it is very interesting to see pockets like this that don’t simply copy either the West or sounds from the Global South. But I think on a global scale, we need time to fully understand what were the influences, what was the earlier clear pattern or what was an accident. Maybe I’ll see it more clearly in 20 years. Now everything is so young you know. In China, it started in 1984, in Indonesia, in the 60s, but mainly the new scene is from the late or mid-90s in fact. These scenes are so young to understand and try 15  See: https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/electronic-india-moog-inter view-paul-purgas

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to find an identity. In Indonesia, many people tell me that their main influence is the Japanese noise scene. Their main influences are from there. So they are still kind of searching—‘Okay, this person is trying to create something that is not a copy of Japanese noise music, but a bit different’. Yet again it is so young that I think we need a lot of time. Even with music here, it took me so many years to realise how many influences of funk, disco and reggae were there in punk music, or even in some early industrial experiments from the 70s. As I was young, I couldn’t understand this. As I listen to a lot of music, I realised that this was like funk but an industrial version of it. But it took me decades to realise this. I guess it will take a lot of time, again. Rewriting history needs history to be re-listened and reformulated. Exactly, yes. What you said about these pockets, I am theorising it by the idea of confluence. (Sonic) intercultural confluence occurs when emergent sonic patterns and forms are audible through a dynamic interaction between different kinds of influences and there is a hybrid synthesis taking place in sound practice. Yeah to me this is important if you really want to pretend that we live in a multicultural society. It is very important that you don’t steal. Stealing is a problem for me. When you appropriate something, you turn it for yourself and then get success or money without crediting anyone—this is a problem. Yes, for example, recently someone was writing about La Monte Young, and was citing Brian Eno terming La Monte Young as the ‘Daddy of us all’.16 La Monte Young made a rapture in the history of Western music by using micro-tonality and minimalism and this minimalism is the father of sound arts in the way Brian Eno reads Young, the father of ambient music. In retrospect, if one delves through a sonic archaeology of this, then the main influence behind La Monte Young’s minimalism is exposed as Indian classical music. Of course! Very few people know about the Indian classical musician who taught La Monte Young for 30 years, but all the credits are going to Brian Eno, and his ‘daddy’ La Monte Young. This is a problem, isn’t it?

 Read: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/t-magazine/la-monte-young.html

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CF: It is a problem, especially for Brian Eno. I have heard him being referred to so many times as ‘the father of ambient music’ and I think ‘oh man, you should have travelled a bit’. In Indian music alone, you find drones, which are not called ‘ambient’, but are like what is called ‘sound art’ in other parts of the world. It is an old practice there. Yes, it’s a basic problem of this Western way of writing history. It’s a big problem though there are some mentions of them regarding young or other (Global North) composers. I forgot which classical music composer from Europe was influenced by Gamelan, in the nineteenth century. BC: Debussy. CF: Yeah, Debussy, for example. These interactions have not been denied; of course, people are not shouting it out loud, but at least it’s written somewhere. Yeah it’s a very difficult topic. Those books have been written in the past more than half a century ago. Sometimes during some conversations or talks where people would ask me—‘What do you think that should be done?’ I think the whole history of electronic music should be rewritten—the entire history. I want to see all the names of Alireza Mashayekhi, Slamet Abdul Sjukur, Bülent Arel, Tzvi Avni, Halim El-Dabh, June Schneider and so on.17 I want to see all those names now in all the books about the history of electronic music, sound art and experimental music. Not someone telling us in three pages—‘Oh, by the way, you know there was this and this and I started to write about this’. I wrote an essay years ago and I can give you a copy or I can share with you a link.18 I need time to update it because in the meantime I found some other artists like these Indian composers, one who was from Taiwan I didn’t know about and one from Singapore I didn’t know, although I speak about him in the book we wrote. I wrote an essay about electro-acoustic music and experimental music (academic) from 1944 until 1980s mentioning all those people in Africa and Asia like. Halim El-Dabh, but I would like to extend it to Latin America as well because even though some 17  Halim El-Dabh was an Egyptian composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, who had a career spanning six decades. He pioneered Musique concrète before Pierre Schaeffer but was largely under-recognised. 18  https://www.academia.edu/10784921/An_introduction_to_electroacoustic_ noise_and_experimental_music_in_Asia_and_Africa

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people have written about Latin America, the average person knows very little about what happened. Apart from Mauricio Kagel and a few other ones, people are often not aware. I think it would be important to firstly speak about them and secondly to re-­ conceptualise it and see who travelled where, who studied what and so on. Once I do a presentation, I play music from that time, and ask people to see that there were so many of those artists, and then some people tell me—‘Yeah, but look they studied in Europe or in the USA’. I tell them ‘Listen, there were so few studios. Many of the Belgian composers went to study in Paris, why don’t you comment about it? It doesn’t seem to be a problem for you if a Belgian composer studies in Paris, but it’s a problem for you if an Indonesian composer went to study in Paris or in Amsterdam. This is not logical’. I think all this should be rewritten and the connections between the people need to be reconsidered. For example, José Maceda in the Philippines: this composer and ethnomusicologist was so well connected. He made such great work over there. I admire Halim El Dabh because of the first experiments he did in 1944, which were in disconnection with everything from the West. We have never heard anyone doing this before him in Egypt, which is an important point for me to write this instead of always speaking about this Belgian-French version of it: ‘There was nothing and in 1944 Pierre Schaeffer arrived and he invented everything’; I have really a problem with this lens, because then you skip everything. You just skip Cage, you skip many others ones as well—this is ridiculous, and this skips El-Dabh. Of course, he didn’t theorise—this is also one important thing in the West, I realise; you need to write something on papers. That is also problematic. I think we are slowly becoming inclusive because I hear people trying to build networks, change this situation and create awareness and also invite artists from South Asia and South-East Asia to give their opinions and version of history. After all, I am writing about them, but I am not really from there. There are always things that I will miss for sure. It cannot be entirely accurate, what I write. I know, I am aware of this; that’s why we wrote in the book that we are aware that we are mostly from Europe and we travelled a lot out there in South-East Asia, but we were not born there, and we don’t know everyone out there either, that’s the thing. I think somebody has to write anyway, and there will always be mistakes for sure. The mistakes are done, but

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we have to try to not make them on purpose. Still my question is why so many of those names from Latin America, Africa and Asia ̇ are rarely seen in the books? Halim El-Dabh and Ilhan Mimaroǧlu studied at Princeton University. Bülent Arel was an assistant at this university. There was a composer from Ghana, I forgot his name—I never managed to find anything from him. He was also a student there like many of those people. And Stockhausen—he performed and travelled in South Africa, in Lebanon, in Japan; he was the first Westerner to play in Japan, the first one to play in Lebanon, in the Jeita Grotto and so on and so forth. If he was there that means there were connections, people knew that. Then you have this catalogue published by Hugh Davies; in 1967, the catalogue was published with electronic music compositions from many countries. BC: Really? CF: Yeah, I can send you a copy. It is from UbuWeb. He was writing about almost everyone and everything that he could find in every studio. There is a list of compositions, including works from Turkey, Indonesia, Japan. Even David Medalla, an artist from the Philippines, is not known for music. He is mentioned for two pieces he composed in 1959 in the Philippines, in Manila. It is unbelievable. Once I talked to my electro-acoustic teacher a long time ago, told her about my research and gave her a copy of this essay I wrote. She told me, ‘I have never heard about those people’. I thought, how is that possible, it’s the twenty-first century, you have got the internet, how can people still imagine that everything happens here in the West and there is no need to look for anything outside of it almost as if it didn’t happen at all? This is pretty sick.

CHAPTER 12

Khaled Kaddal

Khaled Kaddal is a visual artist and sound performer, raised in Egypt and currently residing in London. Allaying science and politics, spirituality and technology, he works with two interdependent abstractions; ‘Immortality of Time’ and ‘Sovereignty of Space’, in search for the imperishable balance between intelligence, emotions and moral judgements. He had a solo show at Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst, Copenhagen; group exhibitions include ‘One the Edge’ at Science Gallery, London; ‘10  Years of Production’ at Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; ‘What Do You Mean, Here We Are?’ at Mosaic Rooms Gallery, London; ‘Art Olympics’ at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; Performances at ‘Keep Quiet and Dance’ at Cairotronica Symposium, Cairo; Zentrum der Kunster Hellerau, Dresden; and ‘Daily Concerns’ at Dilston Grove Gallery, London. Kaddal is a visiting fellow in The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, University of Oxford and a Resident Fellow at Uniarts Helsinki, Finland. He studied Computer Science at AAST (EG) and Sound Art at the University of the Arts London (UK). The conversation with Khaled Kaddal was recorded in Zoom because of travel restrictions, although we met in person a number of times in conferences (e.g. RE: SOUND, Aalborg 2019) and festivals. Later in 2021, I

Abbreviations: Khaled Kaddal—KK; Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_12

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invited Khaled Kaddal to contribute a work to The Listening Biennial in Berlin and other venues.1 BC: Could you give a background about your coming to sound, working with sound? KK: How it started? BC: Yes, how it started. KK: I have a musical background so I have been playing music since I was a kid. I was raised in a family that’s into music; my sister is a flutist. So I grew up always listening to her rehearsing. Then, I picked up the piano and the guitar. My interest in composition grew more than performance eventually. I also graduated in computer science—that was an influence in my artwork. Music theory for me was a big thing too. I really enjoyed understanding harmony and rhythm within the Western music theory. I started to perform with local bands in Egypt, so I started to be more into the Maqāmat—traditional sound practice of the folk ethnic communities.2 The band started with fusion projects—I was travelling in Egypt with the band and comparing the Western music theory and the local musical aesthetics, trying to understand how to theorise folk or ethnic sound, not only the Maqām but also the ethnic practice, which sometimes has differences between the microtones and the way it is played. This grabbed my attention a lot. From music theory and from this area of sound practice, I started to get introduced to the modernist contemporary music, to minimalism, and to abstraction and then to noise. Though my journey started with Western classical music, following a comparative approach, I gradually moved to non-Western sounds. The study in contrast gave me the inspiration to use the deconstruction theory. The deconstruction of music approach paved the way to break the rules, the canons, and from there I moved to the non-narrative, the abstract sound itself, or the textures, the resonances, etc. My early influences included John Cage and then I started to explore more into experimenting with sound. It was the time of the Egyptian  More information can be found on the biennial website: https://listeningbiennial.net/.  Maqām isa set of pitches and quintessential melodic elements, or motifs, and a traditional pattern of musical use. Maqām is the principal melodic concept in Middle Eastern musical thought and practices. 1 2

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r­ evolution; the idea of deconstruction of music came to me naturally as a musician who had lived through such a political transition. Then the Egyptian revolution came and that reflected in your work, right? The concept of deconstructing and all the music theory that I was learning—for example, the idea to put them into pieces and to move to abstraction in the use of the medium—was parallel to the revolution and politics. For me as an experience, it was parallel to the revolution and parallel politically. How did this process manifest in your work in terms of the musical practice to the sonic practice in the light of the deconstruction theories? Yes, deconstruction as an idea helped my introduction to the soundscapes; it introduced me to the silence and listening. That came in another phase, but the first phase was all the deconstruction from within electro-acoustic music as an area. That was a phase. At that time I didn’t have the approach of listening in my artistic discipline—sound as an artistic discipline. Of course, all of us sort of have listening states when we were in our mother’s wombs. But as an artistic discipline, it came after through deconstructing music. At that time I was more into narrative but within the texture, within noise. You came out from that musical structure when your listening perspective changed, right? Yeah, that’s true. So you started to listen to Western canonical sound works but later started to deconstruct it? I have been listening to Western classical music since I was a kid because my sister was a flautist. At the age of 12 or 13, I started to play piano in a classical form and picked up the guitar. In Egypt there were two ways of learning instruments: you have the Spanish flamingo or the classical guitar. I was more inclined towards the classical. I have to mention that I was also raised in a French Catholic school. So my childhood was very familiar with Western or European musical history. Right, so the Egyptian sound canon was exposed to you later on when you were growing up? At what stage of your life were you more interested in ethnic Egyptian music and sounds?

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KK: It was always there; the ethnic soundscape is, of course, everywhere—that’s the common sound—but not in my house where I was raised or not in the community I grew up in. That interest developed from my interest in learning more about music. When I had the knowledge of Western music, I wanted to know musically and in the sense of theory, what was in my own culture. So I started to travel through Egypt and got to know different types of music and sounds, like folk. That was after my high school years. BC: Was this new practice—this new approach to listening—mind expanding or was it leading you to a new knowledge? At a certain point of your life, did it lead you to work with sound arts? KK: Yes. I think one of the things that also introduced me to sound art is the local Egyptian music. They somehow are related to each other from my personal experience, which is through maturity in understanding of spiritualism in a way, and in understanding the listening state in a spiritual aspect; and to understand what is the meaning of transcendence—not to understand it but to experience it. And I got that introduction from the local practices in music. There are Egyptian music festivals that are folk—it’s called Mawlid, which is like a festival that is based on the memory of someone who died a long time ago and they remember the goodness of this person.3 So there is a practice around that and there are specific dances. And it’s Sufism in a way—it’s a Sufi practice. While going to the East (of Egypt) to learn music I started to adopt Sufism, which kind of like opened the door and expanded my ears as you were saying— not only my knowledge but also my sensorial maturity in a way; not only the intellectual knowledge, but also the sensorial knowledge. And that was very beneficial as it gave me a specific approach in sound arts. I really don’t want to talk about it politically but from an Egyptian spiritual aspect how to listen in my sound practice. I think Sufism had a big part in how I learned to listen and work with sound. Definitely, it has expanded my world. BC: Sound art is a European construct. It is a Western construct in the way it’s defined and in the way it departs from Western musical practices. When we talk about ‘sound art’, and when you say that listening to local music in Egypt or ethnic musical practices led you 3  Mawlid is the celebration of the prophet Muhammad’s birthday. Mawlid festivals consist of a joyous holiday and are celebrated all over the world.

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to work with sound arts—these are two different worlds—how did they merge? How did these two realms that are sound art and the realm of the folk, ritual and traditional sounds in Egypt, come together in your work? KK: As disciplines, we can see definitely that sound art is a Western discipline, even from the terminology that it uses—not only from the way it is practised—with all due respect to the artists and philosophers of the Western world. I will tell you how they meet each other because in Arabic language, which is mirroring the culture in a way, there are terminologies of listening states. It’s very deep to have states of listening. I remember when I was a kid there were certain listening sessions in the family. When we were kids we used to have listening sessions, to music. I assume in India, there is something like this also. When I listen to Indian music, definitely there are trance states embedded in the music that mirrors the culture of listening, which is very deep. BC: Yes, of course. KK: From my own knowledge, I know that in Arabic language and culture there are lots of terminologies for listening states that are very deep and you can find it a lot in the religious practices. BC: Like Tarab?4 KK: For example, yes, Tarab, exactly. This is a part of the sound canon. That’s a very sound art concept if we see it from a Western point of view. It’s of different wordings, different cultures of the same phenomenon, of expressing the human relationship with sound. But it’s not a Western practice although we can make it a Western discipline by calling it sound arts. BC: It’s the question of where you put the lens. KK: Yeah, exactly, where would you put the lens. One of the things that I have seen that is very amazing in the sound culture is if you have experience in living with the Bedouins in the desert, they have a very different approach to sound and listening. How they speak and their sensory activity with sound is so deep, that it is important to notice it, because the desert is so silent and so full of echo in some areas. And its deep silence sort of imposes humbleness. Not 4  The term Tarab is used in Arabic sonic culture to describe the emotional effect of music. It is also associated with a traditional form of art-music in which ecstasy and trance have a significant relevance.

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in a concert, not in an installation, not in a book; that’s everyday life, that’s their culture in a way. BC: I wanted to ask you about the sound canons that you have come across. There are different sound canons; there is a Western canon of sound arts, where John Cage is a very important figure or marker. Before John Cage, there were experimentations in the Western musical trajectories and also within performance art. There are sources from where sound arts borrowed different kinds of practices: poetry, for example, performance poetry in particular. Music is a big corpus of works where experimentation took place and that opened up the emergence of sound arts. These are canons that we often discuss, but we don’t discuss the canons that are non-­Western. Did you have any insights into the non-Western sound canons that you grew up with, that inspired you? KK: I would say that the ritualistic practices influenced me more than canons. Of course, in Arabic music, there were certain phases in its history that became standardised as a canon. It became standardised as the Arabic classical music. What interests me more and what is more inspiring for me is the one that is embedded in the culture more than it is seen as a discipline. I really prefer the attitudes inspired by the ritualistic sonic practices found in the oral culture or the folk culture more than the staged or composed or aestheticised or disciplined traditions. I am interested in the fact that its history of thousands of years, even before Christ, still exists and is practised till today, in its raw texture. To give an example, there are lots of sound practices in Egypt that I can mention, for example, the Zār.5 Zār is the ritual practice that is performed in Egypt, you can find it even in Morocco, in Iran; you can find it in this region from the North-West of Africa, in Iran and in some parts of Turkey also. You can find practices of Zār. They are very different from each other, but I love the Egyptian one because this ritual dates back to ancient Egypt; you can find it in the murals drawn, which is a female practice. It is practised to transcend someone who is not feeling good. So if someone who is psychologically down or is going through a mental struggle, they have a Zār session, which is there for hours— 5  In the North African and Middle Eastern cultures, the Zār ritual or zār cult is the practice of exorcising unwanted spirits from the possessed individual through collective sonic performances.

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hours of non-stop drumming and singing. It has a beautiful build up and is very smooth, which reaches a strong peak of intensity in the rhythm. And I love this one because it doesn’t have a stage; it’s practised in houses. You can find some people who do it for tourism but the original one is still practised in houses. So a family calls a Zār group to change the mood of the house. Of course, there are some distortions of history that is also found. Generally, it is a practice for exorcism from haunting demons. If your body is haunted by an evil, it’s an exorcism, so it’s a ritual of exorcism. But it’s also where you’ll put your lens, as you were saying, to consider it a sound art practice. For someone who is psychologically down or mentally struggling, it is practised to change or give this person a boost of trance that gives the spirit a push to awake. I love the ensemble musically and more so sonically—it’s very intensely entrancing; and the thing that inspires me about it the most is the buildup. The buildup is huge, and it is so inspiring for me. BC: Is there a narrative structure, like there is a buildup of intensity and then it reaches a crescendo? KK: I think the only narrative is that sometimes the lead—the woman, who is leading the ensemble—is singing, and the group replies with the singing. Maybe that’s the only direct narrative or obvious narrative. And it’s not about singing as much as praising; it’s like forms of praises or ritual. It’s a little bit melodic but not melodious. It’s just like a very slight melody that’s set against praising. And the build-up is mainly improvised with the session itself: how you would see the person who is dancing and to where they are in a trance, because it is very physically intense and some of them go out of their senses to lose consciousness and some even fall on the floor. So there is a responsibility of when and where the development would lead to. Questions are asked: does the audience have a break or drink enough water. It is a different aspect of buildup, it’s a buildup of the community and it has a responsibility towards the audience, who is a patient. BC: Another practice I was thinking about was Dhikr in Sufism. I have done Dhikr myself in a Sufi session, Dhikr or Zikr.6 KK: Where? 6  Ritual prayer or litany collectively practiced by Sufisfor the purpose of glorifying God and achieving spiritual perfection.

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BC: In Berlin. Dhikr is breathing collectively and is a sound practice performed in Sufism. KK: Breathing, yeah. They are different from each other, Zār and Zikr. Zikr has the breathing exercise by pronouncing the praises in words, and self-organising exhales and inhales in a rhythm. It is a breathing meditation that often reaches trance states. It is very beautiful. BC: It is a sensorial engagement with the body. It demands very much from the body itself. KK: I do remember it like a trance achieved through the intensity of physical sounds. That was one of my cultural trainings. It amazed me. I was young at that time. We had a performance with the Darvesh dancer. And I was performing just behind him. It was on a stage—I was standing behind him while he went into a trance—at some point, he started to scream. BC: Scream? KK: Yeah. He went into a certain sonic state and it was the most intense part of the performance. He was fully into it, he just screamed while performing. I was the youngest—I was very new to this. It was kind of shocking because I was just behind him. I didn’t understand it critically and thought, ‘What should we do?’, and I was just told myself ‘keep playing’. Sometimes I wonder about the fact that in a state of trance within a performance engaging with audiences, you are still aware of the trance state. Is it a limitation or is it mastery? Sometimes it confuses me. Yeah, so we faded out; we were wrapping up the sounds; he had preparations of food and water and other nutrition to fulfil him with energy to prepare for a second performance. The physical and the biological aspects are very important in these sessions. In Zār, we also have the same methodology. BC: When we talk about the ritual practices that heavily influence sound practice, I am trying to understand, what do you draw from these rituals that you can bring into the realm of sound arts? KK: I don’t see it like a job with specific roles. BC: No, not jobs or a role. KK: Yeah, the role, I understand, it is the impact. BC: Impact, yes. KK: There is a very strong lack of understanding or experience of your own spirituality in the West. That’s something I enjoy introducing by showing my own self in a performance. This is why I really relate

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to a performance. How we can all be in a commune and collectively transcend. This is something the West doesn’t have—to understand that collectively you can transcend. It is something that interests me. The fact that it interests me, it means I will have some sort of concern while composing, while performing, while improvising. Yeah, it’s finding out ways to collectively be in the same state of transcendence. This is why sometimes I try to break the idea of performance as an outside object. It is not that audiences are not seeing a performance, or that they are not experiencing a performance, or an installation. No, we are in this state together. You are not just seeing me performing noise. I am activating the noise; I am the one who takes the role or responsibility to make it active, but we are all listeners here. So I try to break the staging aspect, and that is why I don’t like to be in a spotlight, I like to be with the people. In most of my performances, if it is not electronic, you will find me performing on the floor. I love performing on the floor; I don’t like to stand or to sit. I love being on the floor because it breaks something, because it breaks this border between me and my audience. I try to go towards this situation: ‘collectively we are in a state of listening—we are in a state of trance together’. It is not an individual experience. The West lacks this spiritual aspect of sound and listening; if it’s there, it will be a very individual experience for them. I would say this is what I grab from my own experience, from my own sonic culture. And because we have this in knowledge possession, while you are both here and there, you are in between your own culture and the West, but you also understand the idea of sound arts from a Western perspective. So there is this privilege or responsibility to bring them together. BC: But when it comes to putting the lens, there is a particular way of understanding, theorizing, defining sound arts and it comes from a colonial perspective about the other. It includes the process of ‘othering’ and identifying as a nationalistic, cultural, and provincial modality. You are put in a box—‘Egyptian sound art’, ‘Indian sound art’, but not European sound art—which is universalised. These kinds of definitions come from a colonial, imperial perspective, like identifying with some national barriers, limitations, and outside the usual territory. The question is: do you feel this kind of identification as a burden, and if you do feel it, how do you resist? To rephrase the question, do you feel there is a colonial, imperial

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lens put to understand your ‘sound arts’, your sound practice, identifying it with the process of othering. Do you feel it in Europe? KK: Yeah, surely. But I don’t mind it, to be honest. And the reason I don’t mind it is because I understand that it is one step to reach a space where the friction aspect would fade out. It used to piss me off. But when I relaxed and saw it from outside, I found it to be okay—as if it is one step towards that building collectivity. Definitely, we are in a time when the world is static, and so is the contemporary art world. It is the time when everyone from the globe is connected to each other. I think it is a very specific moment, and definitely the engagement will create friction, and friction is part of knowing the others. Through the friction and the engagement we will start to know; so the time that we were living, let’s say 15 years or 20 years of contemporary art, most often it is so tokenistic or involves tokenism and it has the exoticism of the ‘beautiful Egyptian sound artist’ or ‘he is an Egyptian sound artist’. Sometimes it pisses me off, because I just work with sound. Being Egyptian doesn’t put me anywhere, better or worse. It is a tokenism that the world of art is trapped in. But I hope it is a step, it’s a friction and it’s an engagement with the other. We understand that everyone is unique; everyone has their own social background and their special cultural background. Not because I am Egyptian but because I am held as someone who has a different and unique experience, even within other Egyptian experiences. For example, my father is Nubian—that’s not common in Egypt, it’s a minority. Nubians are like an ethnic group. Would someone else from Egypt as a sound artist be the same like me? No. They will be unique given their own background or even their own childhood or everyday experiences. The tokenism of the art industry is suffocating. Sometimes I expect more from the art world. I feel like this is the area of people who sense, who have more vision or seek a deeper meaning in life. So sometimes I have expectations from them. When I revisit myself, I say, ‘Okay, we are all humans at the end. These are just like collective frictions and it’s very specific at the time we are living’. So yeah, to be honest with you, sometimes it pisses me off, sometimes not. But I do remember that there was a time, I didn’t mention intentionally that I was an Egyptian. I used to refuse to say that I am an Egyptian in any performance or in any installation event. But to be honest sometimes I couldn’t—in the recent times, in the last two years, I couldn’t. BC: Then do you like to identify yourself within a ‘universal’ context?

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KK: I wish, yeah. I was working towards that; yes, that’s definitely something I aspire. Yeah, I do believe in universal context. I do believe this is where my lens will be positioned. It is to understand what it means that we are at the end, all of us together. We have ears, we have a mind and we have a body to sense. The commonality of that is more important than cultural identity. BC: I wonder whether universalism has its own pitfalls. It is also problematic in a way. KK: Yeah, nothing is perfect. BC: It kind of homogenises everything under an umbrella. KK: The problem with the universalism is that it could a mask for the colonial acts. BC: Yes. KK: And this is something I struggle with at times in the contemporary art world. The whole world has to have this approach of universalising equally. If not, then it is not universalism; it is using universalism as a mask to mask a colonial act. Sometimes when it is there it is very obvious, I don’t like it. One of the things that I still fear is to have the responsibility to organise workshops in Egypt by bringing Western artists. Lots of friends and lots of my Western colleagues want to go to Egypt and want to be active; and I see that it is beneficial. I can see that it is good; I think it is creating a space where everyone partakes, where that friction or that engagement takes place. It is a production platform, learning from each other; yeah, definitely it is important, but personally I refuse to do it because I don’t want to fall into any non-intentional or subconscious colonial act. I don’t know. I don’t want someone to convince others that this is better than this—that they have a better aesthetic approach. And to be honest there are issues the other way round, if we talk about alienism or colonialism. In Arabic or in Egyptian we have a word, which means that the foreigners, Western foreigners are better than us because of the colonialism we have seen. Their approach is better, their philosophy is better, their aesthetic is better. So anything they would be saying, we should hear, and learn from them. This attitude is something that exists as a result of years of colonialism. So sometimes I have the fear to take the responsibility of bridging these two worlds by bringing Western colleagues in Egypt.

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BC: Do you like to decolonise this field of sound practice in the sense that you like to contribute to the discourse about making the power relationship gets more equitable? For example, Halim El-Dabh was not recognised as a pioneer in electronic music—as a forefather of music concrete because of a colonial lens. Rather, Western composers like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in France were given the credits. So this kind of misrepresentation is something that can be understood from a colonial, imperial, Western-modernist, European, Eurocentric lens. The question is: as artists, let’s say, from India, or from Egypt who have historically resisted colonialism, is it not something we can do in terms of decolonising these perspectives and lenses. KK: Yeah, personally, as Khaled—the person in my work. BC: As an artist? KK: I do have a belief that the work speaks for itself, so I work a lot. So I do art as much as I can, as much as it is important for me in my life. The more I make—it inspires me. Work has its impact by itself. I don’t criticise any other approaches but I am more towards my work personally. For example, I would not like to personally produce something that addresses social or political issues on the surface. As Khaled I bring sensorial experiences from my approach. And my approach is by itself political; my existence—my position is political. So I work as much as I can. After years of working, that’s what I decided: this approach is what I want to continue with. Taking into consideration that I experienced the revolution very strongly, I have issues, and personally have not pleasant experiences of how the work can be seen explicitly political and how the art is an activism. I feel that I am more of an aesthetic and spiritual activist rather than a political activist in the sense of being political as what you are saying about ‘decolonising’. I, myself as performing noise is decolonisation. Just play as you can. Me myself as Khaled being here speaking with you or you speaking, both of us being here conversing on these issues, we are decolonising the sound art field. Let’s do this more often. That’s my approach. BC: When it comes to your own sound work, do you bring something new in the spatiotemporal aspects of sound art which exists in the West, for example, space and time—these are the structural ­elements of sound art that have been practised in a particular way in the West. As an outsider do you like to intervene and suggest some-

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thing new in terms of time and space in sound art? Do you try to shift the perspective in a way through your own personal approach in sound practice? KK: Yeah, in the sense of practice, if you believe any artwork would relate one way or another to the ideas of time and space. Do you mean from a physical aspect of my sonic culture? BC: Yes, the physical aspect of time, space, and other structural parameters in sound and listening—the way sound has been practised in the West from a Eurocentric perspective, in that there is a beginning, and there is an end and there is a sense of linearity in time. There is a spatial dimension to it constituting a stage and audience encouraging a frontal interaction of consumption. These are the patterns; these are the givens. Do you like to disrupt these givens? KK: Yes. If we talk about my thinking and my philosophy: when I do any work, I always have one concern on top and that is to bring a state of timelessness. I do not believe that there is something called future and that there is something called past. This is not in my belief system, in my relationship to sound. It is cyclical—everything is cyclical. There is no linear time scale of one hour ahead and one hour past—this doesn’t exist. This is just the measure in which we communicate with each other. There is growth; we can grow and there are things that expand, the materialism expands, we grow old, we expand, we mature; the earth expands from the Sun. Everything expands or shapes. But the idea of linearity of future and past doesn’t exist—everything is cyclical in movement. And to have a sensorial feel of that, one needs to eliminate or end the idea that it is linear. This is why I prefer not to have a linear narrative. This is why I try to compose or create a state in an installation or a performance, and this state becomes timeless. In an installation, I focus on the body using all mediums that I can or that relates to the project or the concept. In my installations, I have a mindset of space—of how you are sensing the boundaries with your body. In performance, I am more focused on time. Sometimes they connect, but when I have an installation project, my mind is like ‘how to have spatiality of my body’. I had a project, an installation, To the Nostrils of Time, where I tried to bring this one idea.7 From ancient Egypt, I had a phrase—the whole work was based on this phrase: ‘it 7

 See: https://overgaden.org/en/udstilling/18180/.

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wishes you to rise like the smell of a lotus flower’. And the smell goes up through the nostrils of Ra, which is the ‘unity of everything’—the whole collective—human and non-humans, to wish you, ‘to rise like the smell of a lotus through the nostrils of time upon the horizon of each day’. It has a beautiful, cyclical movement as in the Egyptian mythology the smell rises from the lotus that opens at dawn. They have a representation that the sun comes out of the lotus. The lotus opens and the Sun comes out of it till it is complete at noon, then it sets up on the horizon, then the other version of the cyclical thing comes out of the roots again. It wishes you a good rise like the new Sun that it’s a smell that goes through the nostril of the complete Sun to set on the horizon of each day. So every day will be the same cyclical movement. I try to think this way and put it within a space to recompose the space, so I get more into space composing—how to compose a whole space, that is of altered realities, not Augmented Reality. Reality is not virtual, it is alternate reality, how to bend the physical reality. In this project, I was very concerned about the time and space and the inner body experience. For the sound, especially in the performances, I always focus on playing between the resonances of the space. I try to make sonic textures that resonate in the space so I always can think of having a communication with the space—as if we are listening to the resonance of the space. To bring audiences to that state, I play with the state of silence and the peak of noise. I always build up from this point to that point. And how I do it? My focus is to have it in a sense that it is continuous, that the performance is endless in a way. If you want to move, move, if you want to leave, leave, if you want to stay, stay—it will continue. The Western approach of sounds about linear time and immersive space—we are immersed in sound everywhere in the world because of the Western approach in sonic time and space. Even the local music or music from anywhere in the world is affected by this medium that changed everything, when they started to record sound. Recording sound is just like begin, start and end, so everyone is trying to make the song into the record. But in marriage festivals, for example, in weddings, folk weddings in Egypt, the proceedings stay for a whole week. You can imagine the musical aspect in this kind of social situation, how it is continuous, from morning through evening. There is a different approach about time, without constrained by a start and an end.

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BC: Yes, absolutely. To defy this linearity in order to resist the Western ‘recorded time’ constraints, would you like to dematerialise the sense of time or eliminate the sense of linearity? KK: I live it with the body. I am not a big fan of recording; I don’t record. I did it a very few times, so I am not an ‘album artist’—I think I did one full album only once. I always hesitate about recording and I do prefer performance. And in the performance, I leave the experience for it to judge the time. I don’t think of the linearity of composition—I don’t think how it will start and how it will end. I leave it with my body, the body that will tell me how to become my own trance. Sometimes the performance could last way longer and another time the performance is way shorter. And I have no reasons or intentions; I could have been weak that day, maybe another day I am stronger, I am more fulfilled, maybe I am concerned, maybe I am down, maybe it is a full moon that evening, I don’t know the reasons but I let the experience take a decision about when the performance will fade out. BC: Yes, it’s like more orienting towards nature, nature in a broader sense. Nature is emergent, nature is unpredictable, right? KK: Yes, yes. BC: Another thing I was wondering about your engagement with audience, because from a Western perspective there is a stage—for example, in an auditorium—and the stage is a division between the consumer of experience, that is the audience, and the producer of the experience that is the performer or the musician or the artist. You said that in your performance you like to sit on the floor. How do you like to bridge the gap between the audience and you as an artist? Is it through entertainment? How do you like to define entertainment? KK: No. I don’t relate with entertainment. I don’t believe that what I do is relatable to anything like entertainment. I think, relating art with entertainment is a big mistake. BC: Absolutely! KK: Yeah, it’s a big mistake that destroyed art or really made obstacles for art to take its surreal road, spiritual road. No, it is not ­entertaining, my work. But how I would relate with the audience, or how I would engage more with the audience? Let me think. BC: Needless to say that the mode of entertainment is quite a Western perspective, consumerist perspective or capitalistic perspective.

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KK: There is entertaining art in non-Western worlds. I can imagine folk/ethnic music, for example, in the very old practices in Egypt, is entertaining. It is made for entertainment, but it is not the main thing. It is not the thing that takes the whole arena of art. And usually, it’s a ritual storytelling for children or something that gives an educational aspect of ethics, but not for adults. In the Roman times, there are things that shifted, such as killing could be entertaining. For example, people are sitting in a big stadium to watch slaves killing each other—this idea of entertainment was a Roman invention. Art somehow was similar at a certain historical time; art switched its soul towards wholesome entertainment and understanding of art as entertainment overcame the importance of the spiritual role of art. The connection with the audience, I think, is where I focus in terms of sound, that is, how to communicate with the audience? How to be in the same state as of the audience? I mean that the concentration or dedication is how to communicate and share with the audience. I refer it to Salomé Voegelin, because she said it once. BC: How do you engage with the audience? KK: Engaging with the audience is to communicate in both ways. It is not like a one-way communication; it is not the Roman or European staged communication. It is not from the performer to the audience, no. It is between the audience and the performer. This is something I do for emphasising the concern about sharing: the communication is from the audience to the performer and from the performer to the audience—both ways. We are all on the same state of listening, which is in that time and space. We are all at the same time and space. From a different point of view but same time and space; and that’s an experience. How to bring our listening into this awareness is how I would engage with people; I would engage with people such that they would come and perform with me. They would activate the sound. BC: I think this was the last question. You mean to say that to communicate is to bring the audience on the same level of listening with you. Is it a kind of ‘co-listening’ with the audience? KK: Co-listening, yeah. Yes, collective listening, yes, definitely. And with this, I sometimes get confused a bit. You need to see the performance of Khaled. You go and see the performance and experience. There is a big difference between music and sound. You go for a collective listening even if you go for the performance of

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Chris Watson. What Chris Watson performs is a collective listening experience led by Chris Watson, the artist. That’s how I would like to see it. BC: Right. KK: The artist could be the leader of the collective listening but it is a collective listening experience, that’s the whole concept of a sound performance for me, I would say. BC: Right. Maybe Chris Watson is not taking this approach but you are interpreting his performance as a collective listening. KK: Yeah. I just wanted to give an example of a performance where you can find field recording and soundscapes. I didn’t mean to impose anything on Chris Watson; that’s my approach. BC: For example, if you think of Francisco Lopez’s performances, he erases this social connection. He puts blindfolds to each individual listener. KK: Yeah, yeah. BC: So? KK: Actually I also did it in a performance and from that time I stopped doing it. I did it once in Venice. It was my first time having an artistic engagement in a museum; it was part of the Venice Biennale. It was not one of the main curatorial events but it was in the museums. It was a very strange experience for me, because the audience was not expected at all. We had a lot of tourists and I blindfolded them to play noise. When I revisited what I did, it wasn’t the right thing to do. It was my first time to engage with a museum. That experience told me, ‘Ah okay, I need to reconsider where I am’. I am very used to galleries, to cultural spaces, warehouses. But I had never had an engagement with any museum. It has a different type of audience that I can’t blindfold. It gave me a sense about the act of blindfolding the audience as an artist. I never had this intimidation of engaging with the audience and to physically put them in a certain condition. Where are the boundaries of the performer? Where are the boundaries when it comes to the physical aspect of engaging? It is very important thing to consider and wonder—the boundaries of an artist with the physical aspect of the people. With the audience sometimes it is tricky. BC: Why did you stop blindfolding your audience? KK: I do it in the workshops, for example, listening workshops. But it is after this experience in the museum that I am careful. No accidents

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happened but I didn’t feel comfortable blindfolding a type of audience that was not familiar with sound or experimental art. If I do it within a community of sound makers, artists or engaged listeners, I would be comfortable in doing it. BC: Right. KK: I have to be careful and sensible in these things. Sensible to their privacy, physical privacy, it is very important. BC: But as a traditional music performer/sound practitioner from Egypt, maybe someone will not think about this aspect in that way, right? They will just perform their thing. KK: I understand what you are saying. You have personal choices. It is part of my ethics. I would consider the physicality of the person that I want to engage with, I want to listen with or be with, to have a similar or sensorial experience with. I need to be easy and be smart in how I communicate. I don’t want to blindfold them to prove that they are afraid or physically afraid. I don’t want to blindfold them to prove something or to prove a point. BC: Yes, but also to be on the same power level, having a more balanced power relationship. Okay, very nice conversation, I think we need to stop here. I really enjoyed talking to you. KK: Me too, me too.

CHAPTER 13

David Vélez

David Vélez is a Colombian artist interested in the artistic relationship between sound and food. His work operates at the intersections of installation art, field recordings, composition, performance and commensality exploring gardens, kitchens and open food markets as exhibition spaces. David is interested in the strategic artistic possibility of sound and its invisible, immersive, unstable and fluctuating material. David studies food as a vital matter capable of using the bodies it feeds to create revealing assemblages and cartographies. He works between Latin America and the UK, where he recently was awarded a PhD in Sound Art. My association with David Vélez is long. He released my work Wandering Shadows of Sound in 2016 on his label Impulsive Habitat.1 We were co-­ editors of Sonic Field—a journal and web resource on sonic culture.2 This engaging conversation warmly unfolded on Zoom, despite its algorithmic limitations. BC: I would like to ask you about what brought you to working with sound—particularly field recording—from the very beginning of your career or artistic life? Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; David Vélez—DV. 1 2

 See: https://impulsivehabitat.com/releases/ihab116.htm.  See: http://sonicfield.org.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_13

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DV: Well that’s a very interesting question. I think it would have to go back to my interest in filmmaking. When I finished my first major in advertising and graphic design, I went to New  York to take a small course on film production and I started to get really interested not only in the recording of sound for documentaries but also in the editing of sound. In this process, while I was editing documentaries for my university for my course, I started to find an aesthetic sense of what I was doing when editing films. I was doing sound design and editing the conversations and all that; I started to notice that this was an art in itself. This was not only me working in a film but what I wanted here was to achieve something else through the means of sound. Then I finished my course and that sort of triggered everything, and by the same time, I think I started to work with sound. I think I was working on film editing; I was only just using very basic tools. I’ve never been really interested in the very complicated aspects of it. After this, I travelled to New York and again after the course, I went back to Colombia. I worked with sound but mostly on my computer; I think I used a film recorder to capture sound. But the triggering point was when I returned to New York, three or four years later and started to work with composers from Hollywood—Richard Garrett, Ben Owen among others. It was a big group of people working in New York with sound. With my background in film editing and working with these composers, I got the idea that maybe I should get a recorder. I remember it was a Zoom recorder, probably a 2006–2007 model, and this is when everything started. But I would say in terms of a narrative, in terms of theoretical background, I would go back to film school and documentary aesthetics and basically understand field recordings and general recordings as elements which I could assemble. I always perceive in a way that my compositions are in a non-visual field; I always find that my influence on filmmaking speaks in my music and in the way I have composed most of my field recordings. I would say that would be the initial impetus, but if you ask me about sound, I was always very interested in music. My father is a vinyl collector; he is a big fan of music. He would listen to jazz, classical music, contemporary music, etc. So I think listening to music with my dad was also very important. It was a long time ago that I tried to play the drums but I was never good at it; but when I started playing with field recordings, I realised that this is some-

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thing that I can do and the outcome can really satisfy me. So I would say filmmaking and my interest in music in general were pivotal—contemporary music, hip hop, experimental, etc.—I would say these were the two main elements that connect with my interest in sound. BC: Yes, but the one problem with film, even with documentary films, is the temporal aspect of its development: there is a beginning and there is an end—which is a really Western, modernist lens or ear to look at or listen to environmental phenomena or anything that is happening in front of our eyes and ears—to give a linear structure in terms of recording. DV: Yes, I completely understand. I think that background has, of course, been questioned over time, and I think what you are saying is very interesting. Because Colombia is a country that always has this—how can I say—well, of course, we are a former colony, so we grow up mostly in the art and music world, and use the words— ‘Oh look what’s happening in Germany, look what’s happening in England, or look what’s happening in New York’. But I think this questioning of linearity started to happen when I began to do fieldwork in the Amazon jungle: My first trip to the jungle was in 2011, and it was a beautiful experience because we lived with the indigenous community for quite a long time. And while living with them, we needed to work with them; they started to bring us as a part of their community but we needed to have them hunt, I needed to fish. So this experience was what made me begin approaching sound in a different way; as you say, not so focused on a piece itself as a composition, film with a beginning and an end, but it started to relate with sound as a constant company and as a constant element in the surroundings. For example, in the nighttime, we needed to go out hunting frogs and for me, that was a very powerful experience because I was training my ear to find a frog so we could eat—if we didn’t find a frog, we would have to only eat rice. So in a way, being with them showed me that sound is something that could be way more attached to our experience, to our survival and to aspects like eating. Sound is a fundamental part of our life. But I think when we are in a society that is so influenced by ­Western culture, we probably live in a society that is more culturally oriented by sight—by the visual. But when working with these indigenous communities, the interesting question about sound started

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to happen. Not only in the sense that I want to make a composition, but I am more interested in sound as something that is happening all the time and in how I can engage with that. I think that something very important in my work is that I like to question things; and being in a society that is so obsessed with visual culture and understanding how corruption, politicians, media, manipulation and propaganda have actually appropriated the visual imagery, I always found in sound a way in which I could work and be critical about it. In that sense, sound also gives me a position of critique—a position of being able to question things. I think that’s also very important. BC: Yes, absolutely. So I was wondering about a phrase that you mentioned—the Western imperialism and Western cultural influences in Colombia, and in Latin America in general when it comes to training the ear—in the sense, the way sound is perceived, captured, objectified and presented in a compositional format. And you also mentioned the vinyl collection that you grew up with: Jazz, classical, blues. Did you train your ears according to the Western cultural idioms such as these different manifestations, or with the vinyl themselves? DV: Yes. That’s interesting because that will probably be something that I will talk about later, but sound art in Latin America definitely started as a bourgeois thing because unfortunately, nobody in Colombia knew about John Cage or Pierre Schaeffer; It was something for the elite. When I started working as a sound artist in Colombia—and unfortunately it happened a long time ago—I realised that I was a person who grew up with a privilege because my father could afford vinyl from the US and that’s when I realised that unfortunately sound art, particularly in Latin America, grows out of elitism. That’s something that became problematic for me because, as I told you, I want my work to be like a critical device where people can actually see a mirror in which society can be a critic to itself. So I think that process started to change to the point, and that’s something that is very silly but I think it is very meaningful: I have a recorder and it’s been broken since August. I haven’t wanted to repair it. I always ask myself ‘why’? I go out—I am very fortunate to live in the UK—and I live very close to a lot of natural parks. Instead of recording, I do more walks now; I like to go out and listen to the river. In a way, probably the major approach is

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listening without a purpose. Before that I used to listen because I wanted to publish an album or I wanted to have an installation. As you said, it has an objectual approach; it is something in the market. Whether I make money out of it or not, it will be part of a chain of consumption. So I think this has been gradually happening and it is just avoiding listening with an aesthetic purpose. I understand that we cannot escape being humans and I understand that it’s very hard that there is no mediation in art between the artist and whatever sound you want to link with your audience, right? But in that regard, I am now at a point where I am writing a lot (of course, because of my PhD and other projects I have with labels and I have a publication with Gruenrekorder about cooking as well).3 For example, I recently gave a workshop on composition and this is very interesting: I told them, ‘you are going to be cooking a dish and you will have the recorder with you’. So they did that, they recorded silently and then I told them, ‘You know the recorder was a trick to make you silent’. I think one of the major problems that we have is that everybody speaks a lot; as artists, we speak a lot and we think that what we are doing is very interesting but something that I realised—probably you are familiar with Brandon LaBelle’s theories, I always had an interest in his work—is the fact that silence is an attitude of generosity towards things. Probably the most interesting thing that I learned from field recording was being quiet: that it’s just about being outside without making any noise and trying to empty oneself. Because we are thinking—and that probably has to do with what Christoph Cox calls the ‘noise of perception’4—we are always in our thoughts and for me, the possibility to go out and listen or to cook and listen sort of relieves me and allows me to feel myself. Sound in terms of materiality and texture is always connected; in the case of food, with another kind of statics—with my own survival. But that’s what I am now and his work was really interesting because their recorder was a decoy so they could be quiet. They really appreciated it and they said that this was one of the most beautiful sound experiences they had because they were cooking in complete silence. I think  Label page of Gruenrekorder: https://www.gruenrekorder.de.  Cox, Christoph (2009). ‘Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious’. Organised Sound 14 (1): 19–26. 3 4

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that’s very interesting because I think that the recorder at this point in my career, more than a tool, was an excuse to learn the beauty of silence not as a passive action, but as an action. Just the fact that I’m keeping quiet and trying to think and trying to go into a more meditative kind of space, that was so important. The metaphor of me not fixing my recorder has to do with that. How am I with sound right now? I am more interested in experiencing things. Of course, we live in a very competitive world as artists and they want to know if you publish an album, you know? It’s complicated to live in these two worlds because in one you have your theory and pure thoughts but in the other, you have your career and you need to know you need to pay your bills. So I see interesting paradoxes here but I try to keep listening in a more purist way and not saying ‘okay this has to be an album’ or anything. How can I continually engage with sound in ways in which I can learn from sound, if that makes sense? BC: I was also wondering about the very object of the recorder itself when it was invented and started to be used. Was it an intervention into a given situation within a given human-nature conundrum, or was it a technology of documentation, or was it a tool of colonial objectification? DV: That’s a very interesting question. Are you familiar with Mark Peter Wright’s writing?5 His approach to the field is really respectful; it’s very—of course, there’s a level of speculation, it’s impossible to make art and not to speculate—but I definitely think that the recorder is an invasive element if you want to call it that way; because it’s like very interesting how anthropology has questioned itself. In anthropology, for example, in ethnology until 20 years ago, the ethnologist couldn’t actually speak to the relationship he had with the community, whether he developed emotional friendships or a longing affection or relation, that was not a part of the methodology of anthropology. So, the idea of the subject and the observer is I think very problematic, and that probably has to do with the fact that I feel if I record things, I kill them—of course, in 5  Mark Peter Wright is a British sound artist and researcher associated with CRiSAP, LCC, London; he works with field recording and phonography. His work addresses listening and the environment and seeks to amplify, illuminate and interrogate notions of place and situated experience.

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a metaphoric way. I think that is why Francisco Lopez needs one year between recording and composition because I notice that with the recording, there is not only an element of loss, but there is an element that kills the original experience. I think the original experience with sound is so rich, so poetic, that when you just put it in a recorder that is bi-dimensional, or stereo, this poetic richness is mutated. I really work with sound as an element that is part of a multi-dimensional and multi-sensorial experience. For example, while working with food I realised that in your brain, sound stimuli and olfactory stimuli are very connected; it’s something that’s been the subject of many many theories. So in a way, the recorder is— that’s probably the question I’m asking myself now: what’s the role of the recording? I think some of that question has been answered in my PhD and I probably will tell you about some projects later. I really feel—and what I am going to say is probably harsh—but I got the same experience when I talked about something in the academy; I always feel that whenever something arrives through the academy it’s already dead. And I feel when you record a sound, you are away, you are killing the original experience, and plus, when you say, it’s an action of selfishness—I want to preserve this for myself; I’m listening to these birds, creeks or whatever, and I want to take it for myself, I want it to be on my hard drive. I have problems with this and that’s probably one of the reasons why at the moment I’m not recording. Of course, I cheat; I have a cellphone that sometimes I record with when a sound really strikes me, but every time I do it I’m critical about the material that I’m recording because I definitely think that it’s the need to take what you perceive as a natural word, and enclose it like how 2000 years ago people used to cage birds—I think in Colombia they still do it—I think it has to do with that. It’s caging the sound, putting it in, controlling it—there’s a word for that. In a way you want to domesticate the enormous range of sounds around you. So that’s also something that is problematic in my work and is something that I study and am critical about. BC: Yes, when it comes to killing, do you like to relate, or draw parallels between recording and killing an experience for objectifying it in a linear format like on a tape? DV: Absolutely! I have a sentence that is very silly but works really well in my work: ‘I am interested in music that is made when music is

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not meant to be made’. I think that really explains where I am in terms of sound. What is beautiful about the experience in the outdoors or anywhere?: You can enjoy any kind of acoustic experience, but it’s the fact that there is no human behind it, it’s just the environment in its political, environmental sense, just being. You are just experiencing being so in a way, when you try to make it yours, you are actually killing your own experience because the environment doesn’t care. I think the bird probably sees that you are recording; I noticed that some birds like to be recorded; I think birds know when we are recording them. But at the end of the day, the problem for me is—because I cannot put my experience in an album, I cannot put my experience in an installation, the experience is in the moment. It’s also about immediacy, and I think the impossibility to share. That’s why I think workshops are really important for me. I always try to have listening workshops because I think being on time with things is where the poetic beauty of listening happens. Definitely when you record it you are killing it, but for yourself, you know; you are definitely extinguishing that experience that probably could stay more fresh and more alive if you just experience it. Because I think this is interesting: the recorder makes you think about the future. I’m recording a sound because tomorrow I’ll be composing. I’m recording a sound because in a couple of weeks I have a lecture where I will present this sound. But when you don’t have the recording, you are in the moment—in the now—and I think that’s probably the most definite aspect about your question. Is being in the now and being able to experience things in the now some kind of simultaneity? Salomé Voegelin says intersubjectivity, but is there a possibility of being in the now, with all these things that are listening to me, because, of course, I’m there you know, the fact that I’m listening there, gives me a role in there. But I think the recorder sort of relays the problem that we have, and that is the inability to be in the now; because recording is postponing, it’s planning, it’s this thing about the future, and I think in terms of understanding sound, it’s more important to be in the now. So, that would be how best I can address what you asked me. BC: Is this being in the now, more prevalent in the indigenous Latina American, non-Western contexts? For example, in the Amazonian forest or in Colombian local customs?

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DV: Definitely. Well one of the things that I tell you about why they live in the now is that they need to hunt every night. If you live in a town or in a city, you buy groceries on Monday, you keep them in the refrigerator, and then the next week, you go shopping again. They have to find food every day; eating is a matter of everyday survival. So in a way, that kind of thinking in regard to what I spoke about before, is very important because they live the day. Of course, they plan; you know, we used to fish let’s say at 11 AM, and we would get fish for lunch and for dinner. But I think they live in cycles. I think there’s an artist in Bolivia whose name is Guely Morató and we were speaking about this, and she told me something that is very beautiful, which is the fact that time in Europe— European thinking—is more linear, but in Latin America, time is more of a cycle. I think in Latin America—and I agree with her— we work in cycles. The fact that our economy is so complicated, we have so many people making their living out of the day you know, that’s what’s happening with the COVID right now in Colombia; there are people who have street kiosks who sell burgers, they live by the day, they make the money in the day for the day after. So I think all these elements of precarity are also influenced by ancient cultures, making us live in a time structure that is completely cyclic. We are in a cycle all the time. I think Europeans are: ‘I’m here, and I want to go here’: it’s always a planning, it’s always trying, and that’s interesting because I think, if we understand living in a cyclic day, we probably wouldn’t be in the problems that we are in in terms of the environment. I think the problem with the environment is that as a species, we’ve been trying to be sure that in a hundred years we’ll be fine—because we’ll be fine in another hundred years or so, that’s why the industrial revolution created processes that could last longer. So in a way, I think this idea of planning ahead is probably why we have some trouble. Instead, the idea of a circular experience and approach to time probably creates a more harmonic relation with the environment. So that’s what I think about how we approach time; Of course, it has to do with ­indigenous cultures and it’s the fact that yeah, time is more of a cycle, and I think if at one point we could approach that as a species, we probably would be in another scenario. BC: Yes absolutely. So when it comes to recording as an act, does it disturb or intervene in this cyclical order of things which is indig-

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enous, which is situated and embedded in nature? The recording comes in and disturbs the nature of things? DV: Yeah, probably yes. This is a complex question because you know in terms of practicality, I don’t know. But definitely, I think the idea of the recorder brings into the situation the idea of production; that’s the problem that I see with it. When you have a recorder, that means that something is going to happen with that recorder you know, either you’re going to publish it. But the fact that there is a recorder there tries to give purpose to the moment. I think when I spoke before about the experience, I think we humans try to find meaning and purpose in everything, and the recorder definitely puts that in the moment. The recorder says everything is happening because of something that is going to happen. Everything is happening because I want my composition to be great, or I want to have a recording of the moment and so the recorder actually gives a purpose to something that shouldn’t have a purpose. Of course, it is very well known that indigenous communities in America—I think it was particularly in North America— they never wanted to be photographed, because I think when they were being photographed, they thought that they would lose their souls. I think there was a very important indigenous leader in the United States, I forgot his name, but he never got a photograph, because he believed that very strongly. I think right now, given the position that anthropology and philosophy have come to, I would say, more human in a way, then you understand that maybe when you are recording something you are actually taking its soul. As silly as it sounds, compared to when I began recording 20 years ago, now it makes more sense and that’s why you have to be really careful with whom you record, what the recordings are for, etc., because there is definitely an element of appropriation ingrained in recording that is problematic. The recorder gives the purpose, and do we need a purpose? Do we need a meaning for things? I am really for the experience and not seeing the experience as something shallow or as just a touristic experience; but I think listening is an experience where you actually approach things in a way you’ve never approached them before. BC: Yes, absolutely. When it comes to drawing a parallel between recording and the sonic violence of colonialism—because a shotgun is a microphone and a gun also perpetuates violence, like a

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machine gun. Do you think that recording can be a colonial act? Because we need to understand the socio-political history of recording: when it came to Latin America, it came through the colonisers in order to bring a tool of control and establish sovereignty, a tool to map, to objectify, and understand the ‘other’—it’s a tool of othering. Also, at the same time, it’s part of the sonic violence, a part of the violence of colonisation. Do you like to see recording as one of the above I suggest?—As part of the tools of European colonisation? DV: Yeah, because, for example, if I am recording a carpenter, he is doing his job, he is doing his carpentry; he is not recording me, I am recording him. I think that is where the problem begins. He is not interested in being recorded, he is doing his life; he is a carpenter, he needs to make his chairs and his furniture well. He doesn’t need me to do his work. I need him, and I think that already presents a problem. Why do I need him? That is a problem that I face and it is very interesting because my last composition was completely electronic at one point, and this was probably not a big deal, but for me, it was a big deal because at one point I was so immersed in the complexity—colonial complexity—of recording, that I said, ‘I want a piece with a synthesiser as simply as I can’. Because, in a way, it was the first time that I sort of grounded myself; in a way, I was like, ‘why do I need the carpenter, why do I need the birds, why do I always need the outside world to make music?’. So I put myself in an exercise and just wanted to work with a synthesiser and make sound pieces—probably the first purely electronic piece that I made. So in a way it has to do with our saying, ‘the birds don’t need me to be, the carpenter doesn’t need me, the indigenous community doesn’t need me, I am the problem because I need things, I need to be a composer, I need to publish material every now and then’. Of course, there is an element of violence in being recorded, that’s why people probably don’t like being recorded. As you may have noticed, whenever there is a recording, most of the people feel uncomfortable; it’s like working in front of a mirror that you are not seeing. A mirror can be awkward, ‘oh is my hair okay’—a mirror is something that presents problems because we all have issues with self-image in a way or another. I think putting a microphone is like putting a mirror when it is not needed, but it’s ever more complicated than a mirror because I am behind the mir-

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ror. When the police need to investigate they have a mirror where you can’t see what’s happening behind the mirror but they can see you; that’s the dynamic that I compare with the field recordings. I am outside the recording. I am standing just quiet so it’s like I am recording the show. They are the shows and I am quiet there. So in that sense that’s problematic and, of course, as you say, probably the way microphones are designed from this kind of school where weaponry is also designed, it’s all about pointing to things and having accuracy—like saying, ‘ I want to go there’. So I definitely think that everything that you have is part of an idea of design that is influenced by Western thought. And it’s like me in the back pointing to you, and I think that’s the problem I probably would be less problematic if I put the recorder here and you are there. It’s like at least I am becoming part of that; I am joining you in that. So I think, definitely, there is a problem with the recorder. I think it’s Patrick Farmer who writes a lot about sound and the fact that you don’t have an electronic device, you don’t have something that is electronic. Probably one of the problems with recording, now that I think about it, is that accuracy. Because at the end of the day even if you were with a bad recording, you would get what’s happening, but probably the people would feel less comfortable if they were being drawn rather than if they were being photographed. I hate photographers every time I take a photograph; I don’t like photographs at all. Of course, sometimes we took it on trips but I understand my discomfort with photography; I completely understand that: ‘Why do you want to capture me? Why can’t I just be?’ So in those terms, I think the recorder is a violent element and these are problems that we have to constantly think about. But are we going to stop recording? Should we stop making more music based on field recording? That’s a problematic question. But we need to have our practice permeated by those thoughts. Because we need to question the way in which we record things to avoid exactly what you were saying- these intrusive violent elements be it a recorder or a camera because I think they work in the same way. Why do I need them when they don’t need me? How can I make these relations more horizontal? How can we create a common need which we can work around, and not just with me taking you either for my archive or for composition? Because either way, you’re recording to preserve something and that is equally horrible

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because sounds don’t want to be captured. If the bird disappears that’s okay, but we need to keep the sound of the bird because it probably has something to do with our guilt as a species. At the end of the day I completely think that the recorder is an element that affects everything and in many cases it’s violent. For example, that is one of the reasons I don’t take photographs anymore because I started to get that a lot. BC: Do you think that having a sound recorder in your hand as a tool of your artistic practice makes you estranged from the community and nature? Like you are taking a position, and your positionality, with the recorder in hand is kind of divorced from the community; because it was mentioned that you are recording the carpenter from the outside position; you’re recording the bird, you’re recording the Amazonian forest from an outsider position. So this outsider position makes you estranged from the community and nature. DV: Yeah, absolutely. This is a project that I am working on now and it is the main project of my PhD. My project is about how immigrant kitchens in the UK have become territories of resistance and struggle against colonial mindsets. Probably you have heard that in the UK, they condemn the smell of curry whether it is from India, Pakistan, or Jamaica. British society has been really harsh, really racist and completely bigoted against the smells of food but on the other hand, they say- ‘oh we love tikka masala’, they even say that tikka masala was a British dish; fortunately, it was declined by a judge. But in a way working with food also has to do with how I can engage with a community in a way in which I am not this external person, in a way where we can actually develop an emotional relation and that is what I was speaking about the work with anthropology: how stupid it is that the anthropologist cannot speak about the relationship that he starts with the people he is working with. I would say that I will never approach anybody or any environment initially with the recorder—I think the recorder should be the very last point. Of course, I have had to shift my work because of the pandemic but something that I was doing was that instead of recording I was decontextualising sounds. What I did was that I brought the kitchen of my Taiwanese friend in London to the venue. Probably it is an equally problematic process but it is just me trying to approach things in a different way, so I have been trying to recontextualise sound. So basically you are in Cafe OTO but you

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are listening to a typical Taiwanese kitchen in the UK because of the dishes she prepared, because of the ingredients used. So I would say the recording is something that I try to keep to the very end and in many cases, I am not recording because I think it has to do with the problematics of representation as well. When you record you are dealing with problems of representation and that is what I was trying to do less and less. Unfortunately, I cannot play in concerts, but I think it works really well because it’s like I am taking the kitchen and putting it in the venue. This is a process that started because I am working with immigrant kitchens, and this is very important. In Colombia, I am a privileged person, but in the UK I am a foreigner. Things change here, so I think the fact of being in two different positions, being at home and being in a situation of privilege coming to England, I would say I am also privileged since I have a scholarship, but when I go out and whenever I speak people look at me weirdly mostly in the north where immigrants from Latin America are not really common. I think in a few nights I had friends from Latin America who had racist stuff being said to them. So in a way here in England, I am not in a position of privilege like I was in Colombia. For example, I was working with a cook from Thailand; he was very kind and he allowed me to record his kitchen. Of course, he didn’t speak English so we needed a translator, but we spoke about foreign countries because one of the things that I realised is that it has to do with countries like India, Taiwan, and Colombia,—countries that are in the equatorial latitudes—we have a relation with our food and a culture that is very strong. When I came here, I missed a lot of that. So we are in a position where we have a starting point of empathy with the cooks because we have a lot to talk about. I came here and I couldn’t eat my original Thai recipe so I needed to travel to Manchester to get them. It is these very tiny things because I think politics happens in everyday life; politics doesn’t happen in the headquarters of a government, politics happens in our everyday life and cooking is probably the most everyday thing we have. So in those terms, before working with the recorder, I started to work with a point of convergence that could allow me to connect and engage with my field. What was my field?: I was not interested in recording food just as food because I would be recording British food, I was interested in food as a tool of resistance in the situation

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of struggle. Even if I am a privileged person in Colombia, growing up in Colombia where you have horrible crimes committed by the government against the people,—you know, Colombia is a very problematic country—we have a history of violence from the state against the people, from insurgent armies to militaries. So in Colombia, you grew up watching how horrible violence is but how even more horrible it is to deal with violence using violent means. What happened here is that there were all these ideas—probably you have heard there are many theories right now in anthropology that we need to break the silence, and that silence is a cycle, and we need to break the cycle of violence, we need to stop responding to violence with violence. This is probably the most important thing that happened in my PhD.  I learned that immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Pakistan and India when they were condemned, and sometimes stones would be thrown at their kitchens, sometimes they would be subjected to violence, they responded with food supply. And that is the story behind my PhD. Of course, in some cases they’d fight and I completely understand, but in many cases, they responded to violence with food: they say- ‘okay you say you hate my food you say horrible things about me, why don’t you try it first?’. And these tiny actions—and this is something I have spoken with economists and anthropologists here in the UK,—these tiny actions of affection have really helped develop a more tolerant and empathetic society in the UK. So in a way, this has to do with my growing up in Colombia where if you want to see the problem with violence, you go to Colombia. Last week they realised we have more deaths than Chile and Argentina regimens— their military was horrible, we did even worse; it happened ten years ago and nobody knows about it. Growing up in Colombia I really developed a sense of empathy and togetherness. I think I went on for too long but I am still trying to answer the question. Always my approach with whoever I am working with doesn’t start with the recording. Hopefully, in some cases it doesn’t even go to recording; I say- ‘why don’t we bring your carpentry workshop to a space’. But definitely, it is always a start to find a point at which we converge, in which we find this sense of solidarity, to find how we can be in the same position. Because in the end, it’s for me, it’s not for him, for him it’s just the same; it is just, ‘oh it’s a crazy guy from Colombia who wants to record me, blah blah blah’. But in

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the end, it’s for me because I think as an artist it’s very important that you develop a critical or affectionate approach to things. So at the end of the day, the carpenter is my teacher more than my subject and that’s why I always begin with empathy, with dialogue. Food is a great element in which you can have those things conveyed. At the very end, sometimes we do the recording but I always try to work as a human being, establishing an affectionate relationship, an interesting relationship, and then move on to the media or to the presentation. BC: This community building as resistance—how do you incorporate this approach in your own work as an artist? DV: Basically, I think I had a very important crisis, I would say, that happened in 2018. I was invited to do a residency in Italy and at that time I was really interested in experimental music and I was mostly working with experimental artists. We were supposed to present a piece in a town—in a small village- in Italy with around a thousand people and most of whom were over 50 years old. At that point, I realised, ‘Okay I have the opportunity to work with them and to present something to them, and I am going to bring this idea that is still rooted in Pierre Schaeffer or John Cage, very oriented into the aesthetics of Western ideas. What do I want to do here?’ So instead we started to speak with the people of the town, we started to listen to the town and what we wanted to do. We were working with another artist—his name is Fernando Godoy. We said we wanted to give them a gift because as residency artists they were very generous to us—they invited us to their houses to record their cooking, they invited us to their farms to know their processes. In a way, whatever piece that we wanted to do we approached as a gift. A gift is something that people have to like. If your mother and your friends have a birthday, you want to give them something that they can really enjoy. In that sense, we started to work with them and we started to notice how proud they were of their acoustic culture. They were really proud of the sounds of the bells; they have a strong culture around bells. A lot revolved around the church because the church is still the most powerful element in some of these places. Basically, we said, we need to give them a gift. I believe in synergy a lot, so by working with them we ended up making a performance with them, to them. I think it was successful but it was complicated—when the performance was made and the

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town cried, the people we were with cried because somebody had come from all the other places in the world to show them (not to show them, maybe that is kind of arrogant), but to celebrate their sonic culture and it was beautiful—they really appreciated what we did, they really felt, ‘oh nobody really cares about us because we’re a small town in Italy and in Italy people just care what happens in Milan, or Rome’. Italy is very centralised in terms of culture so that was a beautiful thing. Ever since, whenever I work with a community I try to give them a gift, and the gift of my PhD to the UK is this: ‘You need immigrants to come here and give you the possibility to dream of a much better British society’. Even if I am being critical of the UK with my PhD, my best gift is an honest gift, it’s ‘you need immigrants otherwise your society will be far away from being multicultural, from being inclusive, from being generous’. So in a way whenever I work with a community the output should have this idea of a gift, of something that I give to them that they could find something special in, and that they could actually gain something from that. I think probably the most important thing of working with communities is the way I approach it and I am pretty sure there are many flaws; it’s impossible to make a process that is completely horizontal, but in a way approaching works as a gift has really allowed me to work more with alternity, to otherness, and to give. I don’t know if the word is pedagogy, but definitely my work needs to teach something but not teach in the sense of knowledge but in the terms of togetherness and in a more emotional way. BC: Are you trying to shift the idea from ‘commodity’ to ‘gift’? Because commodity is the capitalistic way of looking at exchange while gift is an equal, reciprocal sharing through reciprocity, affection and a sense of community. If you try to shift this from a commodity to a gift, is it something you draw from Latin American indigenous knowledge base or culture or experience? DV: I don’t know and I wouldn’t know. To be honest, my knowledge of anthropology in Colombia is not as good as it should be and hopefully I am learning more about decolonial studies in ­Colombia, and also in Brazil. But that’s interesting; that’s a question I would like to study further but it probably does have to do with it. In general, the idea of the gift is something that I pay for and then you get it—I make an effort with time, money, energy, and affection to give something to you. It probably has to do with it. Maybe I’ll do

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some research about it and I hope I will have a more accurate answer. But it probably has to do because if you see in Colombia we have something we call trueque, which I think in the United States is called exchange, in which one says, ‘Okay, you grow tomatoes and I grow lettuce and we exchange.’ Right? I think it is happening now because Colombia is very advanced in terms of agriculture and horticulture—it’s the possibility to have small allotments in your house—and I think in Colombia a lot of this element comes from our past either you call it the countryside or the indigenous background. But, definitely, the idea of trueque or exchange is very powerful in Colombia right now. I am just part of an enormous group in Colombia working with food, I am probably the only one working with food and sounds but you have artists working with food doing beautiful projects. And exchange happens a lot there and I think that this change from me making an album to creating a gift probably creates a process that is sort of more permeated with affection, with an actual sense of exchange. I think I am more influenced by the influence of the actual communities in the work of art but your question will probably lead me to start questioning that because, definitely, I see something in there and you can see it. There are many works of art in Latin America; I work with market sounds and market sounds have this idea of people shouting and selling their products with their voice. There was a beautiful piece in Colombia and it was a guy that was shouting and he was just exchanging stuff—he had his small car. I think the idea of generosity is definitely connected with the background of communities in Colombia, for sure. BC: When you work with sound, sound is very hard to objectify because if you keep sound in a frame, it spills over, right? So if you play back sounds, it connects people, it makes a bridge between people, it makes a social connection. From you to me, from me to another, and kind of a network of voices through which a community can be built. Are you using sound as community building—if you think about community building as a decolonial practice—or as a ­resistance or resilience? Do you think that sound is an apt medium to do that? DV: That is a very interesting question because for me it took a while to understand what was the actual significance of cooking sounds because people don’t pay attention to cooking sounds. A lot of

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people, when they are cooking, they turn on the TV or they speak on their cell phone and food sounds are not something that happens in the foreground usually. That is why in my exercises the students need to have a recorder because otherwise they will be speaking. Sorry, can you repeat the last thing you said? BC: I was asking whether sound is an apt medium to advance this resistance and resilience as a decolonial practice against Western colonial violence and objectification. DV: So what I realised is what the significance of cooking sounds is. Cooking sounds are really embedded in our memory because when you cook, cooking sounds are similar. For example, I think what we have in common with the Indian culture is that we use a lot of pan-­ frying, so even if you pan-fry in India and Colombia, probably the sounds are going to be the same. So whenever you hear something frying those sounds are connected with your entire history. That leads me to something interesting which is that the sounds that you know are happening are the sounds that are affecting you in a more unconscious way because we tend to believe—and this has to do with psychoacoustics, that whatever we listen to is what we are listening to. But we are listening way further than we are aware of, our subconscious is an amazing sponge where everything comes together and a lot of that happens on an unconscious level. How I approach cooking sounds, which is the work, is that I approach them as ritual background sounds because the ritual is a metaphor. The ritual has changed: we sit down, we have a burger because we eat quickly; you sit down, you try to make a sandwich. The ceremonies of cooking are not the same as they used to be 3000 years ago. Even in Italy they still have the rituals of cooking. They are still very special—you have to start at a certain point of the day, sometimes the church bells are connected with the time of eating. Unfortunately in our society eating has become something that is more ordinary but when I try to approach cooking sounds, it’s the element that brings the ceremonial out of our everyday life because they are very powerful. There is a composer called Lee Patterson who made a beautiful recording and it’s just a fried egg—something really simple, something we all cook but the potency of it is often overlooked. And I think that is problematic because it has to do with the reduced listening but I think Pierre Schaeffer didn’t invent reduced listening. The capacity of humans to find joy and

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pleasure in everyday sounds has been there forever, but I am interested in these cooking sounds as they are the elements that show this is a ritual. Even if you have a small orange juice and I have a very stupid croissant, this is a process that is connecting me with the Sun because this orange comes through photosynthesis and photosynthesis connects me at a cosmologic level with the Sun; even this tiny thing that is the love that people make this croissant with. So in a way what I am trying to work on with food sound is that they show us the importance of eating as ceremonial experiences and this is very important. When you eat something that is not of your typical culture—for example, I am from Colombia and if I eat food from Alaska or I eat food from Germany or I eat food from Australia—you are being open to what it is to be like somebody else, right? BC: I’d like to ask you a final question about your presentation approaches like how you present in exhibitions and performances. Presentation means that you engage with the audience, you engage with the listener. So when you like to engage with the listener, do you like to present your work as a kind of a mode of entertainment? Do you like to entertain the audience or do you like to use the same approach of community building with the listener and the audiences? DV: That’s very relevant because of what I’m trying to do; right now my entire work is focused on sound; I want to engage with Steven Feld and his idea of acoustemology. I still find problematic things about acoustemology because I think most of his work is based on the musical understanding of things, but I think something that is beautiful about acoustemology is the capacity of sound to teach us things, the capacity of sounds to engage us with the world which we are living in and that gives us a more detailed and in-depth perspective. So, for example, usually all of my concerts end up in eating. I always thought that a concert is sort of a radical thing, but when you have eating in the concert everything makes sense. What I really like about food is that you internalise food. You have a piece in front of you, you eat it and it becomes a part of you, your energy for the day, your mood—if that food tastes great you’ll probably feel good about yourself. I always think that nothing should lead to a stop; it’s like the idea of the agitator that you can say how politically we are attached in Latin America because we have a horrible

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history of violence and we have been horribly traumatised and affected by colonial practices. So that is why it is so important that I don’t end my work because I feel if my work stops with an album then it ends. It’s like an energy that stops if my work finishes with an exhibition the energy stops there. That is why, for example, I want to release an album with all the cooking sounds and the album comes with a book with recipes. I don’t want the action that triggered that album to stop with me presenting it. I want to—I hate the word ‘infect’ because of the COVID situation right now, but I think infect is the right word. I want to spread out the motions, the ideas, the experiences that I have. So if you’re going to have my album, the invitation to the listener is, ‘okay you are going to be listening to the preparation of tikka. Well, you are going to be preparing tikka’. I don’t want it to stop with you listening to my album in a chair which is a very Western-oriented, ‘oh I am going to have a glass of cognac and listen to a composer’. That’s not how I want my work to end; I want to create action, I want to move people. This is interesting because this album has two parts including a few recordings of tikka masala. I chose tikka masala because I think tikka masala really explains the problematic aspects of food. The idea of tikka masala is a recipe that I think is 3000 years old in India but in the UK, people started to get it 20 years ago. So I think in tikka masala you really understand the complexity of food. What I did with this album is that I recorded a friend of mine who is from India. She recorded tikka masala but I used the recordings to give it to another musician so they could make music with that. I know it’s very experimental because I have a complex relationship with experimental music, but by becoming those sounds some kind of a score—I would say more than a score is created; it’s like a nourishing energy that the piano player and Supriya, the singer had.6 This album is about how something can trigger something bigger. These sounds of tikka masala inspire these performers to make a piece, but you have to listen to this piece while you are cooking and eating. For me, I believe that the exhibition or the radio piece—I think that radio is different because there’s a companionship that I 6  Supriya Nagarajan is is a UK-based classically trained Carnatic singer who is inspired by not only the traditions of her South Asian roots, but also a drive to work with new ideas, forms and aesthetics from across the world, presented within a contemporary British context.

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really appreciate. Usually, you are listening to the radio and you are doing something else. But I really feel that my work is really important, that the energy that is triggered by one sound—which is the sound when you put the chicken and the sizzle begins—is where possibilities start. So right now in my work, it is really important that whatever I trigger—and I hate the word trigger because it is related to guns. You see how complicated it is, language is so permeated with colonialism and privilege. But it is more about keeping the energy going around, keeping everything moving. That is how I approach my work. So that is why every work of mine right now requires the listener to do something that we learn in food because I think—and this is a beautiful idea that I come up with by working in an album publication with Gruenrekorder—we never eat alone and we never cook alone because particularly now we are a troop, we all fight in the resistance. The way the economic system is happening we are all being. So in a way, we are all resisting—that is why it is important when we are cooking and when we are eating that we are feeding our troops—not troops of war, but troops of generosity, of affection, of love. That is why it is so important that the energy doesn’t stop and it continues and even if the food ends in you, that will give you the energy and that will continue to spread out; it’s like keeping the big energy of life coming. So that is why I think your question is very important for me because it actually helped me realise a few things. But, yes, I think the album itself—the object—is a stop. The idea of a purpose ends somewhere. When you don’t have a purpose all the things spread around more and have more of an effect on everybody, more of a contagious effect. BC: Okay, great. It was a pleasure to talk to you. DV: No, it was mine. Really great questions. When you have a great interview it gives you perspective so I really appreciate your questions. They are really interesting and I hope my work is of help. I will be glad to share more ideas with you if you want to send some material when it’s out. But it was a pleasure and it was a great interview.

CHAPTER 14

Juan Duarte

Juan Duarte is a Mexican artist-researcher working on environmental sounds to inquire on the symbiotic relation between nature and technology, by making artefacts that resonate with planetary energies and ancient cosmo-visions. His current research explores augmented listening of natural environments by experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) and remote sensing techniques. These experiments explore how computers can learn to deep-listen and make sense of natural environments. His work has been presented as lectures and performances in Mexico, Europe and Asia. This conversation was recorded in Berlin, sitting in a café in Neukölln. The hectic activity of the café, and the morning crowd entered the conversation not as distraction, but as a context for engaging on a personal level, relaxing in the warmth of camaraderie as our discussion involved recollections of our previous meetings in Beirut and Aalborg in conferences (RE: SOUND 20191 and POM Beirut 2019).2

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Juan Duarte—JD. 1 2

 See: https://resound2019.sched.com/juan.duarte.  See: https://pombeirut.com/participants/.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_14

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BC: How would you like to describe yourself given the context of this project? JD: I have been thinking about your questions and of how to present myself as an artist coming from the Global South in this context of your research and in the context of sound art practices. I found it important to mention the context of where I am coming from. I grew up in Mexico City in a space where the noise was omnipresent everywhere. It’s kind of a political force in a way that a lot of people are able to demonstrate, be it agencies or other possibilities to make social changes like the way demonstrations gain a space in the public sphere. I mean I am thinking about all kinds of situations. For example, in formal commerce, how there has been this tradition of people selling products and being able to have a lot of social exchange, a linguistic value and cultural reference. It’s a place full of sounds. I think it is quite opposite to how I am now living in Europe. After living in Europe for some years I realised how important visuality is in Western culture. The oral traditions and the significance of sound are much more deep and more colloquial in the case of Mexico. I don’t know if it might be applicable in certain cases or might not. I am sure in the Western world they are heavily dependent and reflect more on visuality than on the aspects of sound. So I would say that maybe it did change my way of listening or rather tuning my ear in this process of negotiating with different cultures. But in a way I guess I also have been able to recognise this economy of sound. In Mexico, where I am coming from, there is a push in the volume and the presence. It’s like there is a constant presence of cacophony, for example. I mean I am from a big city like Mexico City, and you realise that you gain your presence by this presence of sound as well. I guess that definitely shaped me as an individual on a personal level. And I am also thinking about how listening to radio was a part of me while I was growing up; it was a medium that I grew intimate with. Through the years I was able to recognise this and I always wanted to be a part of this through my studies. I started working or associating myself more directly with different initiatives in the production of radio transmissions and radio content and so on. Like sound designing and operating, embracing all of that. I just wanted to be able to conduct myself or

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take the full responsibility of this noise as a work. Well, probably this kind of mass medium is more in America, or coming from the relation between USA and Mexico who share a strong profile of mass media work and mass media content which deals more with industrial or Capitalist approaches. I wanted to resist these kinds of things and be able to introduce myself to cultural activities, into art and explore what was happening in Mexico City in regards to sound art, experimental music. For me, reggae projects where I can play the role of an investigator or an independent journalist are very important. I never had any kind of this background but I did it anyway as a medium to obtain knowledge, meet people and be able to approach the sound to fit into the radar. As I said, it probably has a strong profile or identification with the mass media, with the industry. So I did it for a while and I then left it a few years ago when I moved to Finland, Europe to do my studies. BC: Master’s? JD: Yeah, my master’s. BC: That was 2013? JD: That was 2011. At that time I decided to just move into a different area, which was more of interactive media and sound. In any case, I had these experiences in the background. I wanted to approach the performance and installations more. I have been working for most part of the last six to seven years with that and producing some performances or helping or collaborating with other artists in technology development—this encounter between art and science or art and technology. To be able to develop new tools and also be able to get under the skin of the machine to get more insights of how these things operate. At the beginning, I was a user of the medium, but I wanted to get closer. BC: In the narrative of your coming to work with sound, were there some influences while growing up in Mexico City? Are there some canonical figures you can name or some influences you can mark? JD: Yeah, yeah definitely! I think in the case of music I was mostly interested or maybe my initial approach was through my grandfather. He was a musician (how would I say this?)—he was like the town musician. He was working as a singer for mass services or even funeral situations and so on. This was my first personal contact with

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music in a living situation, although personally I didn’t engage into that. I suppose I was not interested in that back then, or probably just never thought of incorporating this, but it was part of my living experience. I guess there are a lot of things I kept listening to while growing up as a teenager—music and things that I was receiving from radio. At that time when I grew up, we were in the transition from no internet to having internet. Suddenly the internet enabled me to get to know all the things coming from outside my country. There was a strong underground scene in Mexico City even before I started being active over the Internet. So exchanging tapes and CDs and these kinds of things were common activities of the weekend. I would go to certain flea markets where people were able to pirate materials and exchange things coming from the USA or Europe and also get new music, which would get circulated in various niche circuits. I used to approach these friends and people or whoever I was growing up with. But at some point, I think it was when I was doing my University degree, I got to know people who were working on sound art and professors who were specifically developing schools around these topics. To name a few people, there is Manuel Rocha, one of the first Mexican sound artists who went to study in Canada. He was a part of the artist circle. Back then I was not really familiar with these things. And may be the person you interviewed recently, Maria Rebecca. He was also starting his career at that time, so I got to know him more or less in this context or in the same situation. Back then the sound art scene was emerging and bubbling on quite a big scale. It was really leaping from something underground and marginal to what it has come up to in the present. Probably nowadays it is more present in Mexico City and there are special venues and festivals for experimental music. Now it’s more and more established and there is a proper audience. It was really interesting to see this process start when I was still young. These definitely inspired me or moved me to investigate more and connect with people. At that time it was kind of a niche thing. I am still in contact with some artists who are working there. But I think in the last 10 years things have changed radically. I guess the proximity between the USA and Mexico also makes it possible to bring people who are more exposed to the international/global scene. But at the same time, these things are emerg-

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ing within Latin America as well. It’s a very large continent; for example, the distance between Mexico and Argentina makes it difficult to follow what’s happening in the South and maybe sometimes it’s not easy to reconcile. On the other hand, the distance between Europe and Mexico is shorter and there is the possibility of things coming from Spain and West Europe. But I think in any case the possibility of living in a capital city where all trends are crossing is definitely something to be considered when it comes to shaping my profile. BC: Do you recognise any presence of a cultural tradition in an explicit way or at a subconscious level while working with sound? Some alive traditions, which are not European, draw from some other knowledge systems, for example, traditional instrumentations, modes of listening, or ways to work with grounded sound. Did you recognise any of these while growing up and through becoming a sound practitioner? JD: More or less. I probably never claim it explicitly that I work on my own background or tradition. I do a lot of going through the past and researching, experimenting. I have been told about this quite often recently. One of the projects that I have been doing these last few years developed continuously over a period of three to four years. It was also my master’s final project. In Finland, I was working with kites as a musical instrument or an interface to produce a musical environment by playing with the wind and so on. It’s not that I was purposefully developing this project in a traditional way, but at that time I started working with another colleague from university who was from Pakistan. We were talking about this idea of making an instrument that is less technological, which can bring some fun and a kind of ludic approach towards playing music. I think this is something that happens in different parts of the world so I felt a connection or a possibility to relate to someone as I guess we were both coming from culturally similar circumstances. I understood from this project that maybe we can also connect in a deeper manner. My expertise does not lie in these kinds of crafts but I really find it approachable to me to see things like building kites with trash bags and materials that are just around. I like to improvise and use things that are available around me without thinking much about the final shape or the final outcome. And this

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process, which was used for this piece, made me think about the implications of using materials. What are the implications of using just something that is around you? I was also interested in how the word ‘kite’ was used in different languages. In Spanish or Mexican Spanish, it would mean something like a butterfly. Whereas I came across a German curator in Finland, and I was talking about these things and it turns out that it also means dragon in German culture. BC: Did you think of the kite as an Aeolian harp, which is translating the environmental phenomena into audible sounds? Perhaps by thinking through the Aeolian harp, you are tapping into the natural resources with a human agency, rather than keeping technology as a tool for mediating nature with a Western modernist mindset— that technology is a tool to measure and quantify environmental data. You are not using technologically manipulative objects to translate environmental phenomena but exploring a natural phenomenon: Is this the line of argument for you when you picked up the kite as a musical instrument? JD: Yeah, I think it came later on; first thing was definitely being able to play an instrument and getting a feeling of it. I think in a way this is like exploring a space between low and high technology. I am sure that making a kite implies knowledge and is a technology in itself but I think definitely when you are working in these kinds of fields like new media and interactive technologies, you end up in a common place and fall into praising technology that is somewhat digital or something that has this high-level complexity, is dependent on energy consumption and so on. But through this research that I was engaged in with the Aeolian harp and other environmental instruments, I am coming more to the point of thinking that technology is something really ambiguous and can be part of nature as well. The cycles of nature, the environmental or planetary seasons, climate behaviour, etc., are all also interconnected in an ecological manner. Not just ecologically but something that is there in a pure or pristine way. It is also connected to all the things, which are happening in different parts of the world and the agents involved in making these things happen. I think what’s interesting in choosing this topic is to open up my perception of technology. To criticise this monolithic idea that technology is something outside of nature, that it is opposed or that it is like a dual vision.

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BC: Binary. JD: Yes, a binary vision of culture and nature. I think that brings a lot of problems in the present context in different parts of the cultural-­ social life. BC: European colonists aimed to use technology to measure, quantify and control nature as such, and also their colonial subjects. JD: Yeah, yeah definitely. I think there is definitely profiling in tools also that technology has a load of ideologies as well, and it has a load of desires and dreams in the back. I was talking about this recently with another colleague; we are working on a project about this: the idea that technology is embedded already as a device for desire and the subconscious of a group or a collective. So I think when it comes to colonisation and the imperial context, technology has definitely embedded a goal or a prototype of how to shape hierarchy, create hierarchies, create order and create systematic control over social life. I think we neutralise technology if we think that just machines by themselves have an unbiased and ethical approach. Machines are considered to be devoid of human errors, but they are not. For example, how we are crafting our machines, how we are crafting our technologies or even linguistics. If you consider computer languages or programming languages, it’s all in English to begin with and this is used as a way to create a logic that has a strong bias towards the tradition of colonialism, imperialism or it has a lot of control and surveillance. I think probably with art we are able to explore and underline that fact that it is not something that we should embrace blindly. BC: When it comes to your own work, your trajectory, and your journey, you came to Europe in 2011 to study for the master’s. When you came to Europe for the first time to gradually become part of the practitioners’ network and community in the European circle, you got exposed to many different activities, cultural productions as such, in the European artistic and scholarly contexts. How was that cultural encounter and how did you embrace it? How do you negotiate or navigate through these encounters as a Global South artist? If we talk about cultural encounters as such, how was it structured? How do you see your initial years and the trajectory that you took? Did it feel foreign to you or did you naturally embrace it?

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I think there were many encounters in that sense, in a more personal and social way. For me the goal of coming to Europe was clear, I wanted to be able to register all these techniques and register the expertise of going to a country that is highly technologically organised. There is a strong logical and empirical way of how to deal with digital systems and so on. It’s very natural in a way. For me, it was about that kind of trust in a system that is relying heavily on these kinds of technologies. Well, Nordic and Finnish cultures trust in these kinds of things. For me, it was an eye opener having lived in a wholly opposite situation. That’s what the reality is basically; they wonder where I am coming from—I am not saying whether it is positive or negative, it is just very different. You kind of figure out how technology works in different ways, how you can shape these things and how important it is that in a very omnipresent way we use these things in our everyday life. But anyway, it was clear that I wanted to learn about these things, that I wanted to live in a country where these things happen and be able to produce and investigate and research into things that are also connected to the place where I was coming from. I am not just being able to embrace this new world as it is or be part of it, but I am able to reflect on what was behind me. There is this view of technology but there is also the one that I am connected to or these other realities that I am connected with. In the case of places in Mexico City, I can think of these dumps or trash lands where people are recycling, reusing or repurposing creatively. How do you say it, like trash? BC: Junk. JD: Yes, thank you, junk. Exactly. It’s about how to live in these two parts of the world where there are these two realities that are not connecting but definitely you cannot stop thinking that this is actually one single reality because we can see both at the same time. I think actually there is a special opportunity there. We are diasporic artists coming from different and highly contrasting realities. We can see how the world is configured and how things are going from one side to the other. That’s something to keep in mind, I think. BC: I was wondering whether you find your cultural subconscious to be oral or inclined towards oral? Are the things like acoustic communications, exchange of ideas and cultural artefacts are oral at the subconscious level for you as an artist? Does coming to Europe get you exposed to a more visual approach? For example, in India,

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there is an oral bias in exchange of ideas, opinions, and cultural artefacts. But there is a historical bias in European thinking about registering the oral expressions into visual media or print, for example, the Gutenberg. I can think of Indian traditional music as an example of non-European sound practice, in the sense of improvisation, open-endedness and temporally non-linear developments. When in 1902 British officials brought the gramophone machine to record, register, and quantify colonial subjects for building a sound industry, they faced resistance from the musicians themselves because the musicians’ argument was that their tradition was oral. They did not want to register their voice in a 2 minutes 30 seconds long disc. Hence, many of them considered sound recording on a fixed media was a cultural intrusion. You see, what I mean by an oral approach to sound. JD: Yes, yes let me think. Just in regards to your question, what would it be in terms of sound, how can it contrast with the tradition of the Western world in a way? I feel that there is definitely a sense of how performative arts work in a way, how everything is staged and how it should make sense within quite a delimited and boxed format. For example, these things happen in Mexico even if you don’t purposefully look for them in a show or in a stage manner. Street musicians or just the culture of sound is just there; it’s not something that you go to the theatre and see or go to a performance; it’s in the living, everyday life. BC: It’s a cultural event, staged and organised. JD: Yeah. BC: It’s there in everyday life. On the street, maybe in the village market. JD: Yes, you live with it. BC: You live with it. JD: It is not like here where it doesn’t happen in public life. It’s quite orderly and quite discreet and has an economy, which is pushing or moving through your everyday life. Now I guess in Berlin (to be specific), you can probably find these kinds of things more or less spread out and it happens every now and then. But I guess you are just thinking about other cities. In Europe, for example, it’s quite framed out and marginalised. This is something that you really aim to see; it’s like quantification of art. BC: And not only quantification, it is gentrified and curated. JD: Yes, it is a commodity.

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BC: Commodity. A commodity curated through colonial-minded institutionalisation and commercialisation. JD: It is definitely mediated by the institutions quite a lot. I guess, maybe it is just being institutionalised or being part of a specific framework. You know how these things work. But probably there is still a tradition or a connection, in the case of Mexico, that these things are just part of rituals and part of everyday culture. It is rooted in something that is deeper and there is a need for expressing that. If you go to a market in Mexico in the depth of the capital, you see things like witch crafting, dancers or you find people making a spiritual curache, cleaning or something like that. So it is not just a show, it is just how most people make a living. It is about how they relate and deal with problems. BC: Exactly this is the answer I was looking for. As I mentioned, I was thinking about three different parameters while working with sound. One is time/temporality, then space, perspective and improvisation and subjectivity. JD: Subjectivity? BC: In terms of working with sound, how do you think about time/temporality? How do you negotiate that in your work? How do you construct time? Is it something you draw from your cultural background or knowledge systems or something, which is very personal or a combination/confluence of different traditional ways of thinking about sound when you are contemplating time in your work? I ask because the European idea of time is quite discreet— there is a predominance of linear movement from beginning to end. JD: Yes, I guess that’s also something that I wanted to develop while I was moving from this user-approach to media. Things like preparing radio shows where you have a specific time and everything happens in a very structural manner. For example, this is how I wanted to approach only the materials of radio: by having this tactile quality, the immediacy with the technology, it becomes an experiment that you can undertake; it can let us deal with high-temporal phenomenon like the natural radio that I am interested in in this case. You learn to think a bit deeper about time where things are not happening in the time that you want. Or you are framing this into human time, let’s say. But there is something, which is of a bigger scale than you know. If you want to listen to this, then you need to

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abandon the idea of a spectator or that of a viewer in a show; but it is this thing of opening the listening to that which is outside our comprehension of everyday time. This phenomenon is like a mixture of nature and technology, as I said before. I think they give a lot of possibilities to reflect on how this can trigger notions of listening to sound and sound as a medium to explore or use as an ontological device to understand other planetary relations or electromagnetic fields and so on. So definitely, as part of my research work, I think time and sound are kind of shifting into this space. I am always between installation and performance, but my own notions of that are gradually opening up. BC: And perspective? JD: Perspective? Do you mean the perspective of time? BC: Perspective or spatiality of sound. How do you construe space, using sound? Every culture has a fascination or inclination for thinking about space through sound. What is your approach to space when you work with sound? Is space something geometric or something more personal, psychogeographic or hybrid or immeasurable? Space can be something, which has a particular structure, geometric structure. Or it may be open-ended, fluid and permeable. JD: In my recent research, which I have been carrying on in regards to sound, the space is sometimes limited by the staging as well. What I was mentioning was the discreteness of sound performance. It is not for a concert hall or a performance venue; it is institutionalised. For example, in the kite project, I was thinking of ways to bring performance outside by enacting sound in an open space and see how it also brings a level of performing activity and a relation of exploring on the field. One needs to understand that there is not only one kind of sound performance but also these exploratory approaches to sound performances as well that put you in context with the things that are around you—the agencies, the environmental forces and so on. It breaks the structure of how performances are organised. I think when it comes to radio signals it is very interesting for me to explore this idea of telematic horizons and telematic creation or collaboration between two distant points that have an influence on one another. BC: Is it like a collective space, unintelligible space? JD: Yes, that is definitely more important. For example, the way these networks of artists are collaborating even if they are in the same

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space and how it’s more about the conceptual or artistic connection between two people. It is irrespective of the space. Definitely, it’s something more real, more standardised, but I guess besides digital technologies and so on there is still a lot to explore or to go after. I don’t know. So, yes. BC: In terms of improvisation, do you think about an object on a score-­ based representation of sound or do you keep it for unfolding in an improvisational manner? I mean, score is something, which is a very Western idea—the European way of dealing with sound that there is a score and it is an object that a performer should follow. It exists not only in classical music but also in sound arts. Do you think that your own practice is something more improvisational, in the sense that you don’t keep the score as fixed? Or do you keep the score unfixed and open-ended for improvisation to happen around? JD: Coming to my practice, I haven’t yet explored much of these musical traditions of using scores as a tool. But I think down the line I am definitely designing systems, and rely heavily on systems that are working in certain ways and on the way they are organised. I think systems sometimes define or rather the tool shapes the piece or composition. Even though it can be an object, it can be something external to myself to play with. I think the tool definitely has embedded notation, and the interface in the case of computation of technologies, for example, enables you to have this dialogue or interpretation between the human and the machine. BC: In a post-human context. JD: Yeah, definitely, it’s also the interface that is sometimes enabling or presenting you. For example, it has the potential to be read as a score. How to have this connection, post-human, post-digital approach of having an exchange? It is like the machine is waiting or also dependent on the human input, to perform. And the performer is also dependent on what kind of feedback and reactions they will receive from the machine. Sometimes I use visual as well, but sometimes I do not rely on this as a notation system but more as a transductional element from sound to visuals back and forth. BC: Often sounds are performed with an entertainment value embedded into it, particularly in European scenes, like in commercial festivals, in Techno music festivals, for example; sounds are used as a mode of escape (honk makers, noise makers, etc.). On the other end, there is a possibility to incorporate social realities, political

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approaches to use sound, and this goes beyond entertainment and immersion, to be more discursive and critical towards human conditions. Which approach do you take? Do you like to engage with the social realities of today, or do you like to create performances or sound situations, which are more inclined towards entertaining the audience and giving them pleasant moments of escape? JD: I think for me, maybe I don’t cut out in between those two contexts in a clear way. I guess also that the things that I do sometimes are kind of escapes. I don’t want to say that it is a spectacle in itself, but in the case of drone music, for me, it is about shifting out of human time and mindset in a way and having these connections with the environment. It might be portrayed quite often as a spectacle. It is often whether the presentation or the format of the artwork aims to be a spectacle or a discourse. I think there is a very thin line, most of the time. Even if I don’t want it, things sometimes turn out to be more ambiguous or tend to obscure the discourse and be more present in the aesthetic format and just call for attention. It is like establishing the presence of sound. I think it’s a tool; it’s a common place. I don’t see it in a negative way; I don’t think they should be struggling in that way. It’s a resource, I guess. Also, we are working as artists so that we are able to explore and meditate on our own research works. At the moment of presenting something to other people, apart from ourselves and our colleagues, it sometimes becomes a tool to appeal or call for attention with or without the discourse and it’s a complex balance. BC: The balance between giving entertainment value and at the same time keeping a sense of criticality. JD: Yeah, I think the same too. I don’t think it should be one or the other, but about being able to use both in a narrative way. I think those things are happening in all kinds of art. How to drive your discourse? How to drive your message? How to connect or present the format and the form like an art book? What’s present and what is not present, what appeals and what triggers. This means we are playing with feelings and experiences. It is quite often about having something that is—I wouldn’t say meaningless but non-linguistic. BC: Visceral or corporeal sonic experience. Abstraction often does that. JD: Yes, I think it does. BC: Do you like to work on the line of social realities in terms of the content you use, radio, for example?

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Yeah, I think radio is a good example. I think I have this strong bias when I am starting a project on radio. The first thing that comes forward is, ‘Okay, let’s make commentary radio and have interviews and have this kind of format which would be quite commonplace’. But I don’t think I am interested in those things at this moment or am going back into that again. I would definitely want to go into the abstract aspect of the things, which are non-temporal and not formatted into a great transmission or like a broadcast. But rather something which is opening up for other devices or inputs known to enter as a space. Radio is also a space rather than just a place to advertise, or to give a propaganda or a speech. That in itself also acts like a political stance of how to use technology that is kind of dying out after the onset of digital technology and heavy reliance on the internet and such. I think that in itself has some gestures that sometimes even give you a strong statement. It doesn’t have to be a statement there; I don’t have to say what’s happening. But just doing it also has an importance and a meaning. In that case, yes. BC: Do you see any resistance forming in your work and in the trajectory of your practice towards decolonising sound? Do you see a reason to see sound practices and many listening modes colonised in the Global South through technological devices, medial dispositives, approaches of control and rule, generally, the temporal and spatial approaches to colonisation through disembedding of situated sound, For example, the omnipresence of recording as a technology? I mean, as an artist one may need to feel the urge to resist certain devices that are put in place historically and resist as a cultural producer. JD: Yeah, I mean I think so. I am probably trying to resist these black box technologies, the storage or the unnecessary abuse of over documentation of the process. I think as there is more physicality of the radio medium, there is a bigger possibility to experience it not through recording but through other means. BC: For example, live improvisations. JD: Yes, live. I think it goes more into the direction that I want to communicate about this confluence of technology and environment and if it’s presented as a document or a recording, sometimes it doesn’t reach that much. It’s definitely framed into a different experience. I mean for sure it helps. To be able to relate and understand the kind of reaction or response you can get out of it. But the

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lightness of this media is something that I try to keep as a prerequisite to present my work. There has to be something that can be demonstrated in front of the people. I think, yes maybe it’s important to resist the temptation to just make it as a composition, which is only out there once. I mean, it is really nice to be able to have time to compose sounds and to do a kind of montage or a collection of things even though it can be less composed. I have seen the kind of interaction that I have with other people participating in the workshop or these experiences. Just the immediacy of how the technology is responding and how a sound has an effect on it. I think yeah, thank you. BC: Thank You.

CHAPTER 15

Youmna Saba

First part of this conversation was recorded on the courtyard of a youthful café in Beirut. The drone of the café’s exhaust fan was drowning the voices, so eventually we moved to the open, leafy rooftop of the café where the later parts of the conversation unfolded. Youmna Saba later edited the transcript of the recording. BC: Let’s begin with your coming to music and sound experiments. YS: I always loved music. I used to sing as a child and then I started playing the guitar. But it started in a very surprising way in 2006 that I was asked to perform somewhere, and a week before the event they asked me to perform my original songs instead of covers. So I had to write two songs in a week. That was the first time I performed songs that I had written. I was gradually getting more and more into it so to speak. I had no musical background at all and I was exploring quite shallowly with a few chords on the guitar and my voice. At the same time, I met sound engineer Fadi Tabbal, who came back from Montreal that same year, 2006. At that time both of us just jumped into working on some songs I had written and started experimenting, recording and even releasing albums which now surprises me because I wonder where we got the guts to do

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Youmna Saba—YS. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_15

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something like that! Afterwards I started thinking about what I had been doing, why I was doing it, what it means to the region, what it means to me being a musician from Lebanon. All these questions started coming up and I did not have any background to even answer my own questions. I began to research more and eventually enrolled in a musicology programme. My main focus was to understand Arabic music tradition(s). Through this I started exploring different practices and ways of music-making; this is not the conventional way that starts by studying at the conservatory. People generally start when they are children but since I did not get this kind of education, I had to come up with my own ways. BC: In this process, you must have had some inspirations, such as from the local or historical figures influencing you personally. Can you name a few of your inspirations? YS: What I used to listen as a child, what we now call Lebanese Music, which is Fairuz, works of the Rahbani Brothers, etc.1 Then there are also the French songwriters like Barbara and Georges Brassens who inspired me after I was introduced to them through my aunt. As I started growing a bit older, as a young teenager, I used to listen to pop bands like the Spice Girls, because this was a big thing then. I memorised all their songs. So it was very radio-based and passive. I was on the receiving end of influences. And then some awareness was awakened at some point. I cannot pinpoint when exactly I became more curious and started researching more. One big discovery was Kamilya Jubran, and I was very happy to discover her music sort of by coincidence.2 I am still a huge fan of her work; she still influences me. We have become friends now. I really like how she is working with music, sound and textures. Her awareness of Arabic music, contemporary music, sound art—everything combined—is really a genius work. BC: So, your early inspirations were traditional Arabic music and French song-writing traditions. Were you aware of the traditional aspect of 1  Fairuz is the leading living Arab singer and crown jewel of Lebanese music since the middle of the twentieth century. She has been performed widely and across the globe. She has been the voice of the Arab music since she began working professionally as one of the young Lebanese artists to perform at the Baalbek International Festivals along with Sabah, Wadih Safi, Nasri Shamseddin, Abdulhalim Caracalla, and the songwriting and playwriting team of Assi and Mansour Rahbani. 2  Kamilya Jubran is a singer and musician, born in Israel to Palestinian parents.

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the music that you were listening to? How did you relate to the tradition? YS: Fairuz is considered traditional Lebanese music. How Fairuz music relates to the traditional Arabic music is a completely different question and I became aware of this and I started thinking about Fairuzand all these names that represent now what traditional Lebanese music is. Then I started wondering about what existed before these musicians and why am I not aware of how the music sounded like before this era. This was one of the reasons why I joined specifically the musicology programme at Antonine University because they focus on traditional Arabic music, especially the Nahda School in Egypt and Syria. And this is something I really wanted to learn; I wanted to learn the history of Arabic music of the Mashriq in order to understand—not necessarily to practice it but to understand—what the system is, how it functions, how it relates to the region. BC: And also to position yourself within the trajectory. YS: Somehow, yes. BC: Saba is a particular School. Do you belong to this particular sect like Saba? YS: I don’t know the sect; I am not related to that school of thought. BC: You are also exposed to European song-writing tradition. How do you differentiate between these two traditions? Are you very aware of this differentiation—structural, philosophical, musical, and sonic differentiations? YS: Yes, definitely I see all these differences on an intellectual/theoretical basis. When it comes to my practice, I understand where my influences merge or differ and where each element comes from. I can tell, for example, that my melodic side was very much inspired by all the pop music I listened to as a child: the more I started listening to classical Arabic music, the more it started changing in aesthetics. The focus on melodies is something that I really love. Although sometimes I work in a very deconstructed manner with textures and ambience, I still always try to keep a melodic side to it because that is what I enjoy creating the most, and I allow whatever influence to come at play based on feeling. On the other side, I work with textures and how sound interferes with voice, for

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e­ xample. It is part of my research. With melodies I often just sing and see what comes out, but with textures, it is researched and thought about. For example, in classical Arabic music the sound of the violin has a lot of friction of the bow on the strings. I really love that sound and I tried to mimic that on my guitar in a completely different context as I want to use this texture. So I would say that there is a research-based side to my practice but also feeling-based, and I often reflect on that to see where influences come from. BC: I think if we look at it philosophically, the question of reality in music is very different in the two traditions. There is a fascination with the objective reality/tangible reality in Western sonic traditions. So songs or music or any kinds of sounds are organised around a particular kind of reality which is objective. Most musics in Western traditions are programme music. They depict something, or delineate something. But in Eastern traditions (particularly in Arabic, Indian or in African sonic traditions), there is a division. The idea of reality is sort of fragmented—one is the religious reality, another is experiential. These different perceptions of realities are considered and acknowledged. That is the reason why music represents this kind of fragmentation. There is an abstract vision of music that you go deeper into a note; for example, Maqām has 72 different scales, and is going deeper and deeper into possibilities of a particular tone. This is absent in Western traditions. I was wondering about your approach when you started working with music and doing sound, were you thinking on these lines or were you getting influenced? Because the question I am trying to address is about (de)colonisation. I found that during the twentieth century, the 72 scales of Maqām were squeezed into 24  in their musicological treatise in Middle East, because Western colonial ears could not handle the intricacy and complexity of the 72 Maqāms. Is it not a kind of colonisation of the sound? YS: Definitely! And this also impacted somehow our understanding of Arabic music. We sometimes fall into self-exoticism. In many cases, we limit ourselves to the use of melodic and rhythmical characteristics such as some Maqāms that are possible to be played on equal tempered, tuned instruments, or some rhythm cycles. This is a small example of this colonisation of the sound that I had to deconstruct. Alongside studying and learning about the intricacy of the Arabic music tradition of the Mashriq, I started thinking about the

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experience of time in Arabic music and in Western music.3 The time in Arabic music could be cyclical or could be free. In some musical forms, it need not be confined within measures and this is what I have been experimenting with with my looper. I found this dichotomy to be very interesting because the looper just loops a certain fragment and it loops it forever. But how can I challenge this machine and make it work as a free instrument and follow the aesthetics I’m looking for? This is when I started composing in a way that was more linked to language and less linked to a specific rhythmical measure and to the limitations of certain technologies, which impacted how I think of time, texture, the voice vs harmonies (if there are any harmonies), the musical language used, whether the sung words fit into a certain rhythmical structure or not, etc. So there are all these questions. And it is a way of liberating my compositions from the ways I used to think about music. BC: You are framing this as self-exoticisation? YS: My understanding of Arabic music tradition(s) keeps growing and expanding so I completely moved on from doing what I first did in my earliest songs which was the use of certain scales and rhythm cycles that are usually what the West might refer to as Arabic, and which I consider now as self-exoticisation from my part. BC: Chromatic notation from the perspective of Western scale in a way limits the scope of temporality as well as the spatiality. The spatio-­ temporal open-endedness of classical Arabic art music therefore gets kind of limited if you frame it like a traditional performance where you have 24  minutes to perform. This is a compromise between the classical Arabic music and the Western notation system. The first scholarly approach to write about classical Arabic music was in the sixteenth century, and was written in Europe—in the Netherlands. YS: That’s debatable. I mean there are a lot of manuscripts from before the sixteenth century, written by Arab theoreticians but you are right that a lot of scholars from the West came to the Arab world and wrote about Arabic music mostly in the nineteenth century. For example, there’s an encyclopaedia by D’Erlanger, a French 3  ‘In the Mashriq we see the probably gradual replacement of the traditional Arab tone system by the Persian system and the attempt to define mathematically its pitches within the Pythagorean tuning system’ (Plenckers 2021: 28).

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theoretician that consists of multiple volumes. I think that Arabic music went through a lot of compromises because of these attempts to theorising it because it is actually an oral tradition, which is passed on from the master to the disciple. Even the theoreticians, who were writing about Arabic music, let’s say in the Abbasids, were not necessarily musicians themselves but were writing from a philosophical and scientific point of view and linking it back to philosophical and scientific writings from ancient Greece, like the writings of Pythagoras, for example. But later when ethnomusicologists started an actual practice in Europe, a lot of scholars came to the Arab World, especially in the early twentieth century, to study Arabic music tradition(s). One part of the job was to actually measure the intervals used. But these intervals are not fixed and stable, in this (these) tradition(s). There are so many variations in playing them and this quantification just doesn’t work in this case. For example, classical Arabic music has the ability to provoke Tarab. You improvise in a way to allow for this state to be reached, which sometimes requires an interval to be played few cents smaller or larger. But you have to really master the language to be able to improvise in that manner. This was one compromise that happened in Arabic music. At the same time, in the 30s, after the Cairo Congress of Arabic Music was held, conservatories, teaching of the class and orchestras were introduced. And when you have an orchestra, you automatically need sheet music, you automatically need to annotate every single note and this actually took Arabic music somewhere else where it kind of lost its improvisational aspect, which is not a surplus but actually the core of this tradition.4 On the other hand, the introduction of production labels that came into the Arab world in the end of nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to recording on discs, which have limited recording time so you had to truncate the whole experience. BC: Yes, exactly. That’s another question of modernisation, modernity and pre-modern society, pre-modern aural/oral cultures. And this is something very crucial in this project as well. I’m trying to 4  The Arab Music Congress, held in Cairo in 1932, was the first international scholarly and scientific forum on non-European music to bring together distinguished composers, scholars, performers and educators from European and Arab countries having deep impacts on musicology.

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­ uestion the dominant Western colonial modernity through this q project. Modernist devices such as recording are being investigated. Recording actually, as you said, is truncated and limits the scope of the temporal evolution of the free and natural musical improvisations. The sonic moment and its possibilities are kind of cut into a linearity. This linear progression of time is a very Western idea. YS: Recording and also live settings of concerts created distance between the musician and audience of Arabic music (referring here specifically to classical Arabic music from the Mashriq). This music is nowadays less understood and therefore less appreciated and the live setting has a lot to do in that. For example, a theatre setting would push you to play a Wasla (which is a musical suite) in 20 minutes, because a concert in that said theatre cannot exceed a certain time limit or because you’re part of a festival line-up, etc. A Wasla usually takes up to one hour (more or less) because it requires time to evolve and deploy and reach its climax, which is reached simultaneously through a collaborative experience by both the musicians and the audience. Forcing it to fit within a certain time and a certain space removes most elements that give it meaning and allow it to fully exist. BC: We talked about the influences that you had, the inspirations and the historical figures you tried to follow in your sound practice, both from the Arabic classical art music as well as Western song-­ writing traditions, like Bel canto. But both have canons. When we look at canons, there are certain seminal works, which are historical. Can you locate certain canons in Arabic music and sound practices that you were influenced by? YS: I often search for and research the underrepresented in everything. Usually when I know that a work is very big, I go for the less known work and try to explore that. And there are names that did not necessarily make it to history books, like they are not often mentioned, but they are brilliant in their approach of doing things and they were really avant-garde musicians in their times. One of them is a female singer in the 30s. Her name is Sakina Hasan. She is said to be one of the first female Quran singers. She also sang other songs but her way and approach to singing and her use of vocals is worth being studied. And this is one person whose work I would really like to explore further and even if I am not directly influenced by her, this will influence my approach through the way

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she stood out from the crowd during her times. This is very important. Of course, canons like the works of Umm Kulthum especially the compositions of Zakariyya Ahmadand Mohammed Abdel Wahabfor Umm Kulthumare really masterpieces.5 I do not think anyone can argue against that. Zakariyya Ahmad is a master composer and he really knew how to compose for her voice in my opinion. Yes, these are a few references which are always good to go back to. And there is also Sheikh Ali Mahmood. He also recites Quran mostly and his way of using voice and vocal improvisations is just on another level. So these should be studied as references for their musical value but also in order to study the use of the voice because the way one sings, for example, can be very political. It is also very important to be aware of how you are using your voice in relation to what kind of music you are actually practising because it changes from one tradition or genre to another and from one language to another. Two days ago I was with my friend and he was telling me that he was listening to a very old recording of mine and noticed how my voice was completely different then. He said that it is weird because back in the day it had a lot of pop aesthetics to it and now I have lost that. And I agreed, because if I compare my influences from then to now I can see how they have changed and what kind of aesthetics I am more attracted to now and how my voice has changed along this course of time. BC: This ambivalence in the national, social, cultural, and political identities is apparent in the artists I have been talking to. YS: Some Lebanese composers back in the 40s and 50s aimed to create a cultural identity based on the idea of this independent new country Lebanon. So they took elements from Arabic music, local folklore, orchestrated it in a Western way and created this new musical form that we arguably identify as ‘Lebanese Music’. It was not something that grew organically from the coming together of different influences. I feel that it was a decision. I only understood this when I studied musicology and it really shed a lot of light on so many problems and divisions that we have in the country and in our perception of this country. What is its identity? And does it really

5  Umm Kulthum was an internationally well-known Egyptian singer, songwriter of the 1930s to the 1970s.

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matter to have a clear identity? Now I think the question of national identity is not valid in music anymore. BC: How would you like to identify yourself in this particular context— as a Lebanese or a confluence between Lebanese, Arabic and Western canons of sound practices and thoughts? YS: I am Lebanese, whatever this word means. And it means all of these things: the Arabic influence with this Western influence, with the said identity crisis that we are faced with on a daily basis. We feel these contrasting influences but this is also part of our identity. But is it relevant to label music as Lebanese, or Arabic or whatever, in these times and contexts? BC: I ask this question because I experience a sort of resistance from Lebanese artists and musicians when I ask them about this question of identity. They get offended. This Arabic identity somehow is not very well accepted whereas a Lebanese identity is seen as more open-ended. YS: I don’t see relevance in labelling my music in relation to a specific identity. But one thing I’m sure of is that I feel extremely unfortunate not to have learnt classical Arabic music at a younger age because I would have loved to be able to actually perform it. This requires that you are exposed to it at a very young age as it requires a lot of time to absorb and master. It is like speaking a new language. It has to be your native musical language otherwise it is very hard to play. I feel unfortunate to have not experienced that because it is a very rich musical language and I feel that I have only explored 1% of it. BC: In your musical trajectory, your musical practices, for example, in the album Njoum, you are kind of tracing back your Arabic influences. You are trying to incorporate that. How would you like to elaborate on that process of tracing back? YS: I got introduced to the tip of the iceberg when I learnt the history and theory of classical Arabic music of the Mashriq. Then I started listening to the old recordings and I had to admit that I could not make this music. I required a lot of work and a lot of steps to be actually able to reach somewhere close to this music. So I am tracing back to this route but I am not sure whether I will land back in this tradition. But I am hoping in an ideal setting, I would land somewhere that would be at a music that still makes sense to me

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and listeners in this time and space. Ideally, I hope I will be able to do that. BC: These times and spaces are very crucial here because we are talking about a contemporary moment with the baggage of so many things—political, social upheavals and so on. But we can also look at this as a form of decolonisation—decolonising your own musical process, or as un-schooling or unlearning. Do you agree that it is sort of a decolonisation of your practice? YS: It is a process of decolonising and unlearning for sure but not only that. I feel that it is also a process of exploration and a process of rediscovery as well. Not only to trace back to something that existed but also to create something that does not exist. To me, this is much more important than just discovering what I already know but cannot do. BC: I was thinking about three different perspectives, three different aspects. First is time, then space and the third is subjectivity. Subjectivity manifests in improvisation as well as in the durational element. So how would you like to look at these three aspects? This is my way of theorising sound from the Global South and sonic decoloniality. If you like to think of locating these tendencies, would you agree with these three different aspects or would you like to add more? YS: Subjectivity kind of sums up everything, especially in these times we live in. The idea of tradition now is no longer very strong and music is very subjective. It is hard to define a musician’s work within the existing genres because with all the influences and the means to self-produce and to self-publish, and all the technological advances, one no longer needs to belong to any tradition or any current. You can do whatever you want and you can still be listened to; you can still exist as a musician. You can take whatever you want and put your own subjective way of creating. I feel that time and space are very much linked to this because you can choose how you are experiencing time, you can time travel whichever way you want. You can make very futuristic music with all the machines you have or you can go back and play the most pure traditional music in the purest way thanks to the recordings we have. In the same way, you can travel in space whichever way you want. But I feel subjectivity is a good keyword here and that it defines this time. This subjective and maybe individualistic way to look at things defines us all.

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BC: Maqām in its original form suggested a different kind of time and space, kind of a spatio-temporal development, which is not linear or one-directional. There were a lot of possibilities. The sonic history of Lebanon and the Middle East is disturbed by the Western hegemony and the hierarchy of putting Lebanese and Arabic traditions under Western influence of dominant modernity via colonisation. One possible tool of this process of modernisation was recording alive sonic traditions into dead linear commodification, such as on disc or other recorded media. If we closely read this history, the spatio-temporal possibilities of Maqām have been highly limited and highly appropriated culturally through their colonial commodification by the West. YS: Because Maqām music really develops and deploys infinitely within the musical system it exists in. Some modernisation attempts stuck to many other elements that are outside of this system on it. It is like you’re most creative when you are extremely limited but when you have a lot of possibilities you are less creative because you can take from here and there. And this is exactly why its evolution slowed down in that musical framework because it was suddenly possible to have an orchestra, electronic devices, loopers, and do whatever you want. You can go on adding things but it is not an internal development and exploration of the musical system. This actually slows down the whole language. It has just been glossed with options. BC: How would you like to see your future projects? YS: Now I am working on a new project that kind of bridges Arabic language and Arabic music from the Mashriq with electronic music because you can go very creative in both systems. I want to know whether they can be brought together and what can be made out of this meeting. It is interesting to observe these two languages take from each other and use each other from a textural point of view. BC: Can you reach the microtonal elements using electronic techniques? YS: Many existing software and hardware in electronic music allow microtonal elements. But it is not only about the microtones, it is also about other things. It is about the textures, the sounds, the quality of the sounds that are being heard, and our experience of temporality. This is what I am interested in exploring at this point. And ideally in long term, I would like to write a project, which is

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only for voice and Oud. And that’s it! It is most simplified and stands on its own feet without having any other support. But until then I would like to explore all other possibilities. BC: Why is your music sounds so melancholic? YS: It is just an affinity to certain scales that might sound melancholic. Once a friend gave me a very good advice; she told me that you have to find the scales or intervals that move you. And I think these are the sounds, the interrelationship of notes and pitches that actually move me, or inspire me. And maybe that’s why I write in this way.

Bibliography Plenckers, L. (2021). Arab Music: A Survey of Its History and Its Modern Practice. Archaeopress Publishing.

CHAPTER 16

Mariana Marcassa

Mariana Marcassa was born in rural Brazil, in a family connected to the earth that made cheese, sang to their animals and lived on a rural tree spotted landscape. Since 2017, she has been living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang/Montreal where she has been developing a theoretical and practical approach to sound and voice explorations, and the creation of experimental listening techniques. She works with individuals and groups, in private or as a performer. It has been through voice and sound as performance, as aesthetic proposition and clinical intervention that Mariana has been asking how an engagement with sound as vibration and voice is not subordinated to the spoken-language—this might facilitate new modes of experience, and new techniques for living. Mariana has a PhD in Clinical Psychology. She did postdoctoral research at Concordia University where she worked with SenseLab, Acts of Listening Lab, Angelique Willkie and the performing arts cluster LePARC. She is the author of the double book BANZO SOUNDS and BANZO LANDSCAPE, an English-­ Portuguese publication by Grosse Fugue Edition, published in December 2019. This conversation with Mariana Marcassa was recorded on Zoom after we met in person in Sonologia 2019 in São Paulo, Brazil, and had a discussion

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Mariana Marcassa—MM. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_16

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during a bus ride together organised by the conference.1 In this conference, Marcassa gave a performance, which is referred to in our discussion. BC:

I would like to start with your coming to work with sound as a medium. What sparked your interest? MM: It’s a good question. I come from the visual arts. I was 18 years old when I decided to do an undergraduate degree in visual arts. Since the beginning when I started studying visual arts in university, I had the intention to study and develop a practice in performing arts. I was one of the founders of a collective, a Brazilian collective, called Grupo empreZa.2 They are still working together but I was part of the group for ten years. Our performances were intense, pushing the body into limits and the performances somehow had to do overall with the trauma of colonisation—this is how I see our work, okay? Maybe they will not agree 100% with me but this is how I see Grupo empreZa’s work. After ten years of working with Grupo empreZa, I began feeling the need to do something that we couldn’t develop together and so Grupo empreZa was not enough for me. I wanted to question other things. One of those things has to do with how to evoke the affective elements of the text, how to evoke the forces of a literary text. The question about sounds and affection of words came through my master’s degree in clinical psychology. I migrated to psychology specifically because I wanted to study with Suely Rolnik. Have you heard about her? She is a Brazilian psychoanalyst and she has been working in the art field for many years. She really creates this bridge between clinical thinking and art practice through her Guattari-Deleuzian approach. She was working with Deleuze and Guattari in the 70s and 80s in Paris. I wanted to study with her. That’s the reason I migrated to the clinical psychology field, because she’s a professor in the department of clinical psychology at PUC-SP. So I was doing my master’s degree with her. It’s so interesting to study with Suely because for her, what is important in the research is to find/touch the questions that move you. Suely always questions you from the perspective of a clinical therapeutic process. I realised the need to elaborate on my ten years of 1 2

 See the conference website: http://www2.eca.usp.br/sonologia/2019/.  https://www.grupoempreza.com/.

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experience with Grupo empreZa. I asked myself: how can I do that? I started to write my master’s thesis thinking about the body, about the forces that constitute us as a group and I found the trauma of colonisation and its voices while writing my thesis. BC: With her? You studied with her as your supervisor? MM: Yes, she was my supervisor for both my master’s and PhD. A short text of about four pages, a fiction, is the first chapter of my master’s thesis. This text brought me the most important energy of my ten years of experience with grupo empreZa. The text brings forward the idea of bodies or a schizobody, which is a type of subjectivity that is present in Brazil, especially in the interior of Brazil. My experience with Grupo empreZa took place in the interior, near Brasília, in the centre of Brazil; we come from the depths of the country. In this landscape, in that way of life, you feel the memory and traumas of colonialism very clearly. These traumas are inscribed in the bodies and landscapes there. The bodies that appear in our performances are kind of schizobodies; they are bodies that express the tension and pain of colonisation. While I was writing that text, I felt that the text is populated by different voices, by sounds I wanted to hear. How could I explore these sounds? How could I feel or how could I create with the voices that are in the text? That was the beginning of my interest in sound. I started performative experiments in which I put my body on edge. And at the limit, I read the text; I wanted to hear it, to sound the voices of the text through my body, pulled to the limit. For example, I spiralled and spiralled to exhaustion, then opened the text and tried to read, completely exhausted. At this point, my voice was different because my body was exhausted. That was the beginning. I wanted to extract the sounds of literature, the sounds of text; not the meaning but the sounds. That was the beginning of the beginning. BC: Few questions are coming to my mind. One is: how do you describe the colonial violence you mentioned? It is the trauma inscribed in the text and you hear the multiple sonorities like the voices, which are unheard, as if they are inscribed in the text itself, as you can hear and imagine the voices, right? MM: Yes.

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How do you delineate colonial trauma in your work? The voices that you were hearing while reading the text, in what form did they appear to you? MM: I listened to the voices of the text through its rhythms, its affections, its memories, its forces. This text has impacted me for many years. Every time I read it, I cried a lot—even during performances. It was a mixture of personal, collective and impersonal memories at the same time passing through my body. Something very big—a vastness, a world. With the text itself, what happened is that the fiction is composed with different events that each one of us from the group has experienced. We were good friends living for ten years together—it is a kind of marriage. So, we knew the intimacy of each one of us and I knew different stories from each one etc., and these stories are really strong. I will give you an example: one of the participants of the group at that time, he was recovering from a long process of what I would call a kind of psychotic way of living. So he used to lose his consciousness by mixing drinks with medications. He was addicted to medications, he was combining alcohol with medications that were prescribed for mental health. This combination would have a huge impact on his body and mental activity and he would lose his consciousness. While out of consciousness he used to go out for long walks of many kilometres, crossing different cities without knowing what he was doing. His awareness would come back after many hours or even days. In one period of his life, he became homeless in São Paulo. He left Goiania, to São Paulo and became homeless for years. So, this is one example. I took these experiences from each one of us and combined them in order to make visible through the text the following question: how are bodies suffering from the colonisation system that is still present in Brazil? When a symptom appears in a body, it is not a particular, individualised, private problem. Instead, symptoms are an appearance of the problems of the social field in subjectivity. It’s always correlated to something much bigger than us. BC: How do you like to relate to colonial violence in the sense that, historically speaking, that was taking place a hundred years ago? Is it the kind of resonance of that trauma that is still evident today? MM: Yes. It is evident in our current days. Colonialism is rooted in racism and exploitation. First of all (I am not proud to say this),

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unfortunately Brazil was the last country to eradicate slavery in Americas. Slavery ended in Brazil in the late nineteenth century— it happened in 1888, which means that even at the beginning of the twentieth century, we still had remnants of the slavery. So this is one thing. We had about 400 years of slavery in Brazil. Only 100  years ago we really started to construct a different society beyond the slavery system, and that is recent if you think about it. So, of course, there is colonisation itself; I mean the Portuguese colonisation in Brazil was interrupted earlier but the system was the same, and even the Brazilians themselves were colonising themselves all the time. The basis of colonisation in Brazil was exploitation. They were there to exploit everything—gold, plantation, people, everything. So it’s exploitation, exploitation, exploitation. Racism in Brazil is structural. Black and Indigenous communities have been organising and fighting for hundreds of years. Therefore, the situation is very tense, especially because of the current Bolsonaro government. The effects of racism and land exploitation are directly linked to class differences, which are huge in Brazil. We have it all, between billionaires and the starving. I think you know what I’m talking about. So, this past that has devastating effects on today’s society is what I mean by colonial violence, the trauma of colonisation in our bodies. BC: How do you like to relate your sound practice to these ideas around colonisation and its violence and the trauma that is evident in society even today? Your own practices draw from these experiences in your group. How do you like to relate your sound practice to this context of colonisation and its trauma? MM: When I started the PhD, I realised that I needed to elaborate on this pain which I didn’t have a name for yet; that trauma of colonisation. During the research, I realised that the name or the issue that I wanted to think of is banzo. Banzo is a historical psychopathology, most commonly present in enslaved African people and their descendants in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Brazil. Frequent symptoms of banzo were a state of mutism accompanied by inaction: people could not speak, could not act, could not eat and could not work. The most prevalent embodiment of banzo was a slow and forced erasure that often resulted in death. Banzo was something that caught the attention of slave owners, of course, because there was no solution for it. This also catches the

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attention of nineteenth-century researchers, naturalists and foreign physicians who came to Brazil in the nineteenth century to study the nature, geography and population of the new land. In these studies, I could see that the concept of banzo was developed based on European references at the time, which does not surprise us. It has been described as a kind of tropical melancholy, as a kind of nostalgia. In these studies they say that banzo was an illness from homesickness, they longed for their home and that was the reason they were dying. So I asked the very obvious question: ‘No, there’s something wrong here, it’s not about homesickness, it’s about slavery’. During the research I made a brief discussion to differentiate between melancholy, nostalgia and banzo. I gave to banzo its own concept: a suffering created by the violence of slavery. However, as an artist I wanted to explore banzo, from the point of view of sound, of sonorities. From my point of view trauma vibrates in our body. It’s a kind of pattern that keeps repeating the same, the same rhythm. I wanted to hear what kind of frequency and rhythm banzo produced in our bodies. I think this trauma is somehow inscribed in our body in the same way that racism is structural. This experience is part of our subjectivity, it is here somewhere in us. And I would also say that it is present in the land itself. I like to think that trauma is also inscribed in the land, in the landscape, because the land also feels it all. The land was and continues to be colonised. Then I started to develop it. I chose the voice as a device to get in touch with these sounds. As the state of muteness is one of the symptoms of banzo, I asked: what can the voice tell us about a trauma? How to explore the voice and make these muffled sounds audible? So from that point of research, I started to discover a world. I’m not a musician so it was a great discovery for me! From contemporary experimental music to ancient civilisations; ancestral populations, natives, cultures that work with the voice as a healing tool, as a tool to open the body and soul and develop a process of becoming. The modal world, that is, the one that encompasses all Eastern traditions (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arab, Balinese etc.), Western ones (ancient Greek and ancient European music) and all the Peoples of the Forest (America, Africa and Oceania), maintains a relationship with music in a chaosmotic logic. Their musical practices invoke the universe to constitute the cosmos with it, but without

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losing its connection with chaos (noise, instability and dissonance). I’m very interested in modal music and its relationship to harmonics, intervals, silence, and microtonality. I’m interested in all this richness of microtones, overtones, intervals of modal music. During my research, I found that interesting tonal music (which the Western world has as a reference) was created at the same time that the Americas was colonised. It is, then, also part of the project of colonisation of the Americas. I remember well when I started listening to overtones, throat singing and microtones in different songs, my body was trembling, vibrating higher (it still vibrates every time I listen to it!). There is something powerful in overtones which today I know through studies of sound therapy, but I already intuited this during my doctorate. That’s why I invested in researching voices, songs and musics that bring this vibrating capacity. Then I started experimenting with my voice, extracting strange, muffled sounds to hear the banzo. I started a poetic research on banzo sounds, making performances, experimenting with my own voice. But the idea is to ‘listen to the banzo’ in order to be creative with it, produce a difference, transform it into something else and change its pattern of repetition. I am exploring it. It’s something I’m speculating. The use of microtones, overtones, spaces and silences that modal music teaches us are powerful tools to make the soul tremble and shake. Overtones make the soul vibrate higher; it can contribute to the creation of a new vibratory pattern. One of the disastrous effects of colonisation and capitalism is the disconnect with this ability to vibrate higher, to sing the voice, to invoke the universe and to constitute the cosmos with it. BC: An extraction. Extractivist colonisation. Exploiting nature and natural resources by humans as part of nature to feed the colonial and capitalist system. MM: Absolutely. Yes, exactly. BC: In your performative practices with sound and voice, like the one we heard—the one example I had was from the Sonologia conference in São Paulo in 2019 where you performed on stage, using the voice, voicing a kind of damaged and traumatised nature—you were gulping down natural objects, materials, and you were performing the voicing through this process. Can you elaborate on

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the methodologies and the approaches that you take in your performative practices with sound? Sure. For example, in that performance, first of all, we were in a place presenting papers and research. So it was about talking and explaining our research through speech. However, I am very interested in words beyond meaning. I am interested in the sonorities of the speech, of our words, and also the voice as a device to evoke those sonorities that are repressed by the logic of spoken language. Also, here, I would like to ask you about your exploration of the spoken language, because you are challenging the meaning-­ making process of voice, and also because you are challenging colonisation through the linguistics, and semantics. You are trying to look and listen to the voice not as a semantic linguistic phenomenon or device, but rather as a sound-producing object voicing the trauma by itself in a phenomenological way rather than a semantic or ontological way. That’s it. Perfect. Thank you. Absolutely. What I do is invite the sounds that inhabit me, that make me possible—sounds that cross me. I invite those sounds I learned as a child, which have to do with my experience with animals, for example, or which have to do with my experience during the ten years of working with Grupo EmpreZa. All these sounds that bring me to landscapes, to different experiences, sounds that evoke this colonial Brazil, a colonial memory, the Banzo, etc. So I invite sounds and try to create with them, exploring them through my voice. But at the same time, it is these sounds that create me, that create with me and make me travel, make me connect, make me something else. So, somehow, through the voice, landscapes are created, connections are made, and a process of becoming comes about. Alternative landscapes. Alternative? Sorry, I didn’t understand. You are trying to recreate landscapes. Aren’t they alternative landscapes? Or decolonial landscapes? I’m not sure, I think it’s both at the same time because these landscapes are pretty much colonised but there’s always something that escapes it that’s beyond or below colonisation—that’s very much alive and vibrating. There are intensities, and I am always trying to invite the intensity of these lives to be there through

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sounds. There’s also something that I would also like to share with you from my point of view, because it is my personal experience. I bring a lot from the countryside. The way that people correlate to the animals, how the herdsmen work with cattle, for example, in Brazil, animals, farms and birds. Yeah, the connection between men and nature; I bring from this universe because I come from it. BC: And non-humans? MM: Yes, and not human. It’s interesting because I see the connection between human and non-human through sound. For me, it’s the sound that makes this connection, this relationship possible. For example, the way herdsmen sing to cattle in the interiors of Brazil. Or, for example, the Mongolian people and how they produce their guttural chants and their songs for the sheep, for the camels, the wild horses, the steppes, the winds, etc. There is something really precious in this context and I am very curious about it. They create other universes. They really, through the voice, become cattle, they become camels, they become sheep; it is a becoming. It’s very beautiful and full of potential. BC: Yes, it’s natural integration. It’s like an intersubjective relationship between humans and non-humans and that is encouraged through indigenous traditions. MM: Yes, exactly and those connections were cut off by colonisation. It was the first thing that colonisation did. Disconnection. There is no longer any connection between the body and the land, the knowledge of the land, the songs for the land and for the other. That’s about it. No more. There is a huge crack between humanity and the earth. BC: Estrangement, divorce. MM: Exactly. BC: You would like to listen to those possibilities, right? MM: Hmm. BC: You respond to slavery and Black people, but do you also try to facilitate voicing of the indigenous? MM: Yes, definitely. One cannot think about slavery and the colonisation of Brazil without acknowledging the massacre and violence against the Original Peoples. I don’t know if I intend to facilitate voicing of the Indigenous though. How many times have you been to Brazil?

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BC: Twice. MM: When you came for Sonologia, that was the second? BC: Yes, that was the second visit in 2019. MM: And where did you go? BC: I was meeting indigenous communities and artists who are working in the field. I got in touch with an artist collective and also a few scholars from São Paulo University who were working with the indigenous tribes and resisting the ethnic cleansing that is taking place today by the Bolsonaro government. MM: Okay, beautiful. But then did you go to other cities? BC: I didn’t get the time to go to other cities but I’m going back again next year and I plan to go to, for example, Bahia. MM: Let me know when you are there because usually at the end of the year I am there too. Let’s see. BC: Like in the winter time? December? MM: December time. It’s summer for Brazilians. Usually, I am there in December and January. I couldn’t go this year because of the pandemic, but I would like to be there at the end of this year and next year too. BC: Okay. Artur Matuck is there, I would like to meet him again. MM: Ah yes, nice. He is from USP (Universidade de São Paulo), right? BC: Yes.3 Coming back to the performances and your therapeutic practice, because you are also a practitioner who does therapeutic practices with sound and psychoanalysis, how do you like to relate the sound practice and the psychoanalysis practice that you do? Is there a link? MM: I think there are a lot of connections and a lot of disagreements. I am in the process of elaboration, so I will not be able to answer this question accurately. I’m trying to find a way to make this possible as a conversation—sound practice supporting psychoanalysis and vice versa. It’s not easy for me. I am exercising at this moment right now in my practice because I have been studying sound therapy. But I could say that psychoanalytic listening activates elaboration through speech. The practice of sound therapy activates the elaboration by the body and soul. In a back-and-forth, one drives the other. There are times when words are not enough and it is necessary to go straight to the body, to affection. In this, sound 3

 See: http://www2.eca.usp.br/crp/docentes/artur-matuck/.

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therapy is very powerful as it works with vibration on the body. The patient receives vibratory rhythms with tuning forks in the meridians—this makes everything vibrate, awake. It brings a deep alignment. It is beautiful to see its effects! Is it possible to draw a parallel between your sound therapy practices and psychoanalysis therapeutic sessions with your clients, and also your performances with sound, using voice as a vibrational force? Are they converging at one point? Yes, my performative practice feeds my therapeutic practice and vice versa. On the therapeutic set, I also work with the voice of my patients. Many are artists interested in understanding their artistic and personal processes. We work with their voice so that they can hear what the word hides. It’s an intense process because when they start to explore their voices, problems appear and some solutions too. When listening to their sounds, the memories that the voice makes you hear, something happens. It’s amazing! It’s super powerful. But what kind of voice are we talking about? It is the voice that is below the communication, right? The voice that is not at the service of the spoken language, which is not at the service of meaning, etc. Perhaps the link between psychoanalysis, body work and vocalisation is its therapeutic potential. The ability to change a repetitive pattern, transform it into something else, make another song sing in us, a freer song that opens the channel for energy to flow and for life to pulsate. Right. So in your approach, the process of decolonisation is to make the unheard voices from the body itself audible, right? Could you ask me again please? Whatever we are doing as artists or as scientist is to unearth the voices that are embedded in the body, repressed and submerged under colonial violence and hegemonic practice of colonisation. I am asking whether, for you, the decolonisation process is to unearth them. Yes. Unearth them and compose with them other songs, vibrant sounds! Is that, in your understanding, a decolonisation process? Exactly. That’s the point. Okay. How do you like to see the future in your own practice? You are finishing your postdoc and then you’d like to focus on your therapeutic practice as a performing art practice, right? Would you

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like to continue performing with sound and voice particularly as a vibrational element that is connected to nature, decolonisation and memory? MM: Yes, I want to unfold both performance and therapeutic practices. They are correlated and connected; they help each other. How do I like to see my future? At the moment, what I see so far is me dedicating myself to therapeutic practice. I would like to have a good space to receive my clients and the opportunity to practice more. Maybe I see myself working in a mental health centre, I would be happy to do that, for example. As for the artistic area, I love performing but only when I have an interesting opportunity. I no longer have the desire to be a professional artist, a recognised artist who participates in big exhibitions, biennials and things like that. I have no such intention. When I get good invites, it’s wonderful, but that’s not my main goal. My goal is to work with people and contribute to the world. The way I can contribute is mainly through therapeutic practice. BC: Through performances you engage the audience, right? Maybe the audience can become the receiving end of your own ideas, not necessarily in a consumptive way but something that you can share and develop with the audience themselves, in the form of collective performances with the audience. MM: Yes, of course. Totally. There were exhibitions where I set up a space to receive visitors and with them I developed ‘individual sessions’. There were performances in which it only happened with the gestures and presence of the other. There were ‘ritual’ performances that we did together, through sounds and songs. These proposals are something between art and workshops, or art and classes. I’m always in the middle. Between therapy and art, between performance and workshop, between performance and therapeutic session—always in between. BC: You are also part of the Listening Lab and the Sense Lab.4 How do you contribute to their research and artistic practice? MM: I think that for Sense Lab, I was able to contribute to the clinical issues that emerged at the time. They were very interested in schizoanalysis—the psychoanalysis that Guattari and Deleuze created. SenseLab was interested in creating proposals that could 4

 See: https://www.concordia.ca/finearts/research/labs/acts-of-listening.html.

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include clinical thinking. I think I contributed to that. I was working with them, creating propositions, inviting people, developing workshops, thinking together, bringing my research, etc. For the Listening Lab, I think my contribution has to do with the dimension of storytelling. The work of the Acts of Listening Lab is concerned with storytelling as a healing tool. By sharing our traumatic stories, we can heal ourselves through this narrative; by listening to the other’s story, we work through our own traumas through the other’s experience. However, as I am more interested in words beyond sense and meaning, etc., I questioned the privileged place of speech and I had the opportunity to develop a long workshop with a group of people with whom we deeply explored the power of voice (and not speech) as a therapeutic tool. BC: Like the asemic sounds? MM: Exactly. Perfect. Yes. BC: What is the role of affect? You work with affect quite a lot. So when you perform in front of an audience, do you like to entertain them or do you like to engage them in an affective way? MM: No, it’s not about entertainment. It’s about affecting. Yes, I search for ways to create intensity, summon forces that can really affect. An affectation that opens up new paths. BC: Is there anything that you’d like to add on what we have been discussing so far? MM: I think I would like to add that this is all a great experimental field for me. And I’m in process. Nothing is a conclusion. What I feel is that I am very grateful for this path and for all the opportunities I have had. It has recreated me and I am very happy about it. BC: Wonderful. Actually, it’s fascinating to unpack the idea of affect when you think about what the role of sound and sound practice is in community building and the wellbeing of humans and also to find contexts to practice equity, reciprocity, equality and social justice. I think the idea of asemic sounds, or sounds that don’t contribute to language and its traps, is not yet explored in this field. You are working on that particular pathway; how to uncover the a-semantic, non-linguistic sounds, which go undercover in our body as vibrational forces. They need to be heard. They need to be listened to in order to shift the perspectives so that people can listen to their own bodies that are repressed under the colonial and capitalist conditioning of language on one hand, and social

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conditioning under today’s surveillance societies on the other. This is fascinating, how you are entering the field and uncovering the possibility of sound, which is beyond language. MM: Thank you. BC: I would like to also tell you that the performance in Sonologia 2019 was very engaging and I would like to suggest that you also continue to perform in different contexts. MM: Thank you very much, this is very precious and important to hear. Thanks. And I love performing, I shouldn’t give up on that idea. It’s great to hear that from you, it gives me strength. Thanks. BC: Great. It was a pleasure talking to you. MM: It was a pleasure talking to you too.

CHAPTER 17

Amanda Gutiérrez

Amanda Gutiérrez was trained in and graduated initially as a stage designer from The National School of Theater (Mexico City). Gutiérrez uses sound and performance art to investigate how these aural conditions affect everyday life. Gutierrez is actively advocating listening practices while being one of the board of directors of the World Listening Project, formerly working with the Midwest Society of Acoustic Ecology, and currently as the scientific comitée of the Red Ecología Acústica México. Currently, she is a PhD student at Concordia University in the HUMA department and a research assistant at lab PULSE, the Acts of Listening Lab, and an active member at the Feminist Media Studio at Concordia University. This conversation with Amanda Gutiérrez was held via Zoom and recorded on its platform. As a follow up, we had a series of email exchanges in which Gutiérrez suggested further edits which were helpful. Gutiérrez added a few notes at the end of the conversation as supplementary information and comments. BC: It would be helpful to know about your background and artistic practice particularly in relation to sound and listening. AG: Yes. My name is Amanda Gutiérrez, I am originally from Mexico but I moved to the United States 20  years ago. When I was in Mexico my interest in sound started with the radio. I had been Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Amanda Gutiérrez—AG © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_17

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fascinated by the radio as a source of main information and this is because my father was a Communist and we lived in a commune—a Socialist commune. I was not allowed to have a TV; we only had a shortwave radio. So he always played the radio and looked for Radio Cuba or Radio Russia and that to me was the first encounter with radio and with sound itself from the texture, from the different languages. It was really the main source that I had to be out of my home. Then as my life evolved the radio was constantly an important source not only of information, but also a source of identity, and a source of connecting as a teenager with other external (in this case Western) influences. However, when I started in university, my radio informed more into science. I was working with radio, Jam Radio, and also short wave radio also as another important source. Then when I moved to the United States, sound became more political because then I realised that I was an immigrant person and I was no longer just Mexican but I was actually identified as a woman of colour, as a Mexican, and as an immigrant Mexican. That really opened up a new conversation with me about storytelling practices but with sound as the bones of all my work. My artistic work was coming from storytelling narratives, from immigrants—especially teenagers—who were my students at the time. These practices were connected to memory, memory of the space and how these storytelling practices connected to a place that exists for them but they will never come back to (or if they go back it will be a no-return to the United States because most of them were undocumented). So that aspect of the political realm of sound for me was crucial in understanding my own identity as Mexican but also in understanding my other identity which was Mestizo. Being Mestizo but also being in relation with something that I never understood till I was in the United States which was the story practices that my grandmother told me about my great-­ grandmother’s relationship with sound in the Sierra De Oaxaca and how through walking practices she was connected to many forms of listening and navigating the mountain. This is something that I realised when I was far away from home and when I was returning with the privilege to actually have a green card and eventually became a citizen (of the United States) which is not the case for many. In my case I was able to do it, so I was to come back and forth and that was the main part of my work: the storytelling narratives,

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working with sound archives predominantly and sound field recordings from these locations. I did a lot of work related to not only my past. Actually, I never talked about myself and my previous work; I was always seeking for stories of immigration. Immigrants whose journeys involved coming from one space; basically a journey that usually was intricate (or not) but ended up in a space that we also don’t know how we end up in because of our residency. I guess what they always described in their stories through their stories and their soundscapes is what I was also seeking as my own answers to my questions—and I was finding some answers. But that was the first part of my artwork—many of them related to the migratory storytelling narratives through sound. BC: Your approach to listening was developed through radio exposure and also through the storytelling practices of your grandmother. Were there other influences that were building your personal canon? AG: Yes, this is very interesting because as a Mexican teenager that grew up in Mexico and was listening, for example, my dad used to listen to classical music or high music—the hierarchical music. However, my mom and my father always listened to the music of protests from South America; so a lot guerrilla, a lot of music that was extremely open as well in the narratives of guerrilla stories and to be honest, I always listened to that day and night and was a little bit sick of it growing up. So as a teenager I went in the opposite direction and I started listening to what my dad would call the music from the Capitalist countries such as the USA and he was like, ‘this music is so bourgeois’; even jazz for him it was bourgeois. But to me, it was a way of identifying myself outside that scope of the ultra-left soundscape which was extremely political. Just the lyrics—my name is Amanda and there is one song that is called ‘I Remember You Amanda’ and it is about a couple who were split because they went to the guerrilla in the mountains. That was interesting because it is part of my sonic memories. Then as part of my own finding process, I went through listening to Goth music. The Goth music that we received was mostly from Europe and also from the United States and all their aesthetics was very different to me. Physically speaking, I did not understand what it was saying because I did not speak English at the time and so that was like some kind of hybrid that I absorbed about what is the ideal way to be even in terms of the aesthetics of looking and also the aes-

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thetics—in that moment as an early teenager—of listening. And to be honest with you I kept my evolution into electronic music and experimental music but most of the time it was through a view over the West: the Global North was kind of the way to be in order to perceive myself as ideal or as a musician. This is the interesting part: when I immigrated to the United States I was doing noise and doing a lot of my own experiments with sound by using radio as my main instrument that also collides with the randomness of the spectrum where I was located and I was very driven by that. I am not saying that I found anything particularly unique—I mean John Cage was doing that even before I was born but the interesting thing to me was that the connection with each location where I immigrated was a connection of the radio. I understood myself as a performer, more than a musician. Of course, I am not a trained musician, but my years and my connection with the cultural landscape that I remember since I was a kid connected me to the familiarity of browsing into these realms of sound with the radio. I identified myself through other musicians also—in this case, from the United States—but it was very hard by that time (the early 2000s), to find women. It was almost impossible; in Mexico, there were one or two. When I moved to Chicago there were women but there were almost no women of colour doing sound. Being an immigrant was also another kind of exotification at times among the glitch community in Chicago. That helped me also I have to say, because I was kind of like one of these unique individuals and being with the glitch community in Chicago really marked my way of creating sound. Especially the hybridism that I hear from El Señor Coconut, for example: I was driven by that relationship of the South and the North with him being a white man in Chile. I was interested in that kind of connection between what happens when you are from the Global South and move to the Global North or vice-versa, and how you change and also how the soundscapes that you do change as well. BC: Did the protest songs and the ultra-Left soundscape at your home inform your listening at a later stage? Or on a broader scale, did the Mexican soundscape, the aboriginal, indigenous sonic cultures, and the sounds of the vast landscapes of Mexico come back to you later on?

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AG: Yes, it does in many forms. For example, I always talk about the soundscape as one form of indexical, and at least to me, it is a way of approaching space. So when I go to record soundscapes in Mexican enclaves in the United States (e.g. in Brooklyn or in Chicago), I have my methodology to record soundscape by identifying the music, the patterns, the relationship with who’s living there, who is broadcasting that and what is the store. But that is kind of my way of recording by the identification of the Mexican music that I hear. Of course, there are some immigrants in Chicago, for example, the regions that you will hear in the music and the soundscapes in the radio are mostly from the South and some of them from the North because there is also a lot of migration from Jalisco. So you hear very specific kind of music that I find myself drawn to. Without exotifying I record it and I do it not only by recording directly from the soundscape, but I try to do binaural platform microphones where I speak or where I embody different sounds that are related to the space by talking to the people there so that I am not just grabbing that sound. But now as an immigrant, I feel very attracted to those sounds and I guess it is a form of self-identification with a space that is not necessarily Mexico but it is like a virtual space. To me, that virtual space gets familial through those sounds that are specifically from those regions. BC: When you engage with the migrant communities in the USA, is it an auto-ethnographic approach that you take? AG: Yes, it is an auto-ethnographic approach and specifically because when I do the soundscapes I also try to use pedagogical tools: I do solo sound walks by myself, but I am more interested to do sound walks with students who are also immigrants. So when we do the sound walks, we go to particular spaces, we talk about them, we relate to memories that arise when we were listening to those specific soundscapes and most importantly we also analyse through the soundscapes, the social relations and the economical relationships that surround those spaces. Segregation is very obvious when it comes to immigrant enclaves. Sonic clues exist in how these spaces are segregated and how those spaces have a particular language, have a particular population and in the case of Sunset Park, why there is just a flux of different immigrant enclaves. When we do the sound walks, how do my students, for example, intersect or how do they connect to each other when they speak different languages

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and when they hear these sonic enclaves together. So yes, it is an ethnographic work but I think it is driven by pedagogies. BC: Is it something to do with this auto-ethnographic approach, precisely sonic auto-ethnographic approach? Is it something to do with the decolonisation of the ethnographic lens? AG: Yes, because when I started studying soundscapes (well not soundscape studies but acoustic ecology), I was very surprised by many of the assumptions that others have about being visible or being objective, and objectively recording something or recording the locals or recording what is in there. I found that very problematic because I know as a documentarian and as a person who does non-­ fiction that that is a myth. Every recording and every sound editing is subjective in fact. Like when you are walking, when you press record, how you record and how you present yourself in the space will influence the recording. So it is very important for me when I am doing these recordings, to appear in the recording and not to be just like the pure ear because that is impossible. On the contrary, I want to emphasise that I exist there and that my existence also implies some connection with the recording that I am forming or that I am in that moment registering. The second part of that comes when I edit the sound—as an interdisciplinary practitioner I usually combine those sounds or wave with other particular elements that can be only sound or at times I do still pictures that are related. Of course, when I was recording if I took a still picture of the sound or sound landmark, then that’s kind of the relationship between two of them; or in the installation I take objects and those objects have a relation with the sound. So yes, I have to accept as well that my occularism is still there. I am also very visual but the sound to me is the material and it is the element that drives my questions and these questions are of who I am and most importantly that I am not a white person; I am not perceiving in the same way as R. Murray Schafer had and I neither have access to everywhere like a Flâneur who can have a microphone.1 It is in fact there, that my identity as a woman of colour/as a Mexican immigrant of colour in Canada (now I am living here), will have an impact and

1  Schafer, R. M. (1994). The soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Rochester: Destiny Books.

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will create a narrative when I edit and when I record. So it’s inherent for me. BC: When it comes to recording as a technology, do you find it’s problematic in terms of othering the subject-object and also othering in the same way as the colonisers/settlers relationships? AG: Yes, I think that’s a very important question that I have been working also with another student. She’s not a PhD student, she is a master’s student but we collaborated on one walk. I’ve been doing walks in the past with a 360 camera. However, I have to say that with her it was the second time that I worked with a Black woman who is an artist. I have to also emphasise that they are artists and therefore they are looking for an aesthetic reason when we are walking. We are not necessarily just walking for them as my subject to say something; no, we are collaborators in this environment—in this virtual environment—and yes, we are talking about that we are talking about appearance. The 360 camera is an object of surveillance or it came out from this technology of surveillance with a military purpose. Now we are using it and there is nothing that escapes from the lens, not even yourself. This is very interesting because there is no way of opacity in there, everything is very vivid, very public and to me, I think what I like about that is that I am in the frame and my identity is in the frame and it is now going to have a scape. I think that is very problematic but also when you assume that problem, through editing or the voice-over you can actually conceive or state what is the purpose that you are using this for, what are the visibilities that you want to expose or what is the purpose of using that technology. You know, something that I have been thinking especially about binaural headphone microphones is that nobody knows that you are recording them because it is not like a shotgun, right? It is so seamless that I find that I am spying on people and they are not aware that they are being recorded. That is why sometimes I run away from conversations that are not my business and I go to other places because I think the binaural/the surrounding technology, such as 360, is very invasive. So maybe through pushing your own body through the lens this invasiveness will have a meaning where you are actually exposing first without taking in and grabbing everybody’s identity as your main subject. I don’t know, maybe you are like the shield of it or you are the first face that the camera sees but with a purpose.

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BC: How do you like to resist? How do you like to hack into this Western, modern technology of sound recording, and repurpose it, reclaim it, or appropriate it in your own way? AG: Yes, I have to say that I am not and this is problematic and that’s something that I am working with. Right now I am exploring augmented reality through an app; I did not code the application, I am using an application that is for creatives that is called Echoes which is free or semi-free and I have been using it without payment. So we can say that it is not necessarily open source because you are not controlling the source. The source is already made. I am just adding information on it and creatively putting it in space. How I am doing that and how I am trying to hack the use of that is not necessarily through the code but through the use. I am suggesting that instead of having the audio walk that connects you with this very individualistic perception of a sound narrative, we use the app through amplification with many speakers so that we are a collective body like a sounding collective body that walks in a specific space. In the space that I am adding the sounds are spaces that I found very conflicting. So in the case of the latest sound walk that I did is a walk with Collages Feministes Montreal2 where they do these collages in the street with very significant and political messages. I am part of the collective and the interviews that you hear are interviews from some members of this collective and also from #Vivas3 which is a collective from Argentina and also, in this case, Viv Corringham speaking about the first and second wave of feminism, post-feminism with #Vivas and then the feminism that exists here in Montreal. The problem that I find in myself through making this is that I have to approach more intersectional feminism and #Vivas is the closer feminist collective that I think is driving me to that. I am trying to go through those spaces now or through those collectives from South America that are doing sound and with Gabriela Aceves-Sepulveda, who is another scholar and is also my 2  Grassroots feminist collective based in Montreal, which uses a paper collage technique to place political statements as protest in allience with marginalised communities. https:// www.instagram.com/collages_feministes_montreal_/ (Last visited 11/24/2121). 3  Se escuchan #VIVAS, is a sound collective from Latin America, which has created a collective sound database created from sound field recordings from the 8 M protest. https:// seescuchanvivas.tumblr.com/ (Last visited 11/24/2121).

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advisor. We are forming the term Sono[soro]ridades (Sono[soro]rity)4 and with that term we are trying to find that sound can be a political tool to understand coalitions not only in the public space but as driven by sounding, and sounding by creating recordings, by this action of sounding in the space and also by producing database. So we are creating right now this term as I am speaking, that is why it is a little bit vague but in huge terms that is what we want to do. We want to focus more on South America and therefore for this project Vivas are important. All the soundtracks that you hear in the streets and as a first iteration here in Montreal are Vivas in connection with these other narratives and interviews. When I did the first iteration I did three sound walks in three different places that are connected urbanistically speaking and it was very interesting because it was disruptive: it was like a skateboard park where it was mostly 90% men skating (and I will say masculine, I don’t want to say it is queer or anything) that we were walking through with our big speakers and we were blasting the feminist voices of these collectives and also the soundtracks. They are mostly about claiming the space because I don’t know if you know Vivas but Vivas is extremely interesting; it is a collective that records the soundscapes from protests in Latin America in certain cities and they do a sound database and produce the soundtracks collectively speaking. They put them in their SoundCloud and they are free to be used as copyright material. I would be working with that so to me that was very powerful—sounding those messages in Montreal. Is it called Vivas? Yeah, #Vivas. Okay, I know Sonora from Brazil. It is a feminist group of sound artists from Brazil. I am going to write it down. Since you migrated to the USA and then to Canada coming from a Mexican growing up, did you find there were differences in approaches to listening in the Global North and the Global South?

4  Prof. Gabriela Aceves-Sepulveda and PhD Student, Amanda Gutierrez, have started the configuration the term Sono-(soro)rity, as part of a transnational feminist theory and practice(Chowdhury and Philipose 2016), at the Mexican Conference of Acoustic Ecology REA in 2020 and at the II CIPS Borderline Sonorities Confernce in Brazi in 202I where we co-organised and chaired a research track entitled Sono-(soro)rities: Feminist interventions in Sound Art.

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AG: Oh, yeah. Yes, definitely. And this comes from Mexico. I have to say that I am from Mexico and I grew up in Mexico City but I travelled several times to Oaxaca where my grandmother’s direct lineage is. Yes, I have been analysing that because also I was living in Finland and in the Middle East for a little bit (in Abu Dhabi), and I’ve been thinking a lot about the way of listening. I understand that the soundscape in Mexico is always, always, something rushed especially when you walk in the streets. If you walk as a woman you have to be very careful in the sound clues that you reach, especially in the night, they are crucial for you to transit the streets. So, yes, to that extent the soundscape, besides being very dense, is full of language so people scream from corner to corner, ‘Hey!’, and also something that I noticed that I actually miss is the ‘public sounding’. I think that is why I am doing this project and maybe very unconsciously. Because public sounding goes from everybody—informal vendors do carry their speakers and they walk around with the speakers sounding their messages or the vendor of mangoes just have a chant and they blast off chants. Actually, there is another collective that is called Fieras Fierras5 that have a chant, a collective feminist chant, and they blast it with speakers and that is very common. So the soundscapes in Mexico overall have a lot of ambiances also depending on whether it is the night or during the day, clues like the trash. So there is a sonic language that is complicated that is also very local because each of these sounds will carry meaning and then that is something that I noticed I don’t have here; I think the soundscape in Montreal is kind of mute in a way. It doesn’t have either the potential to be used economically speaking because the soundscape is also an advertisement. Not the soundscape, sorry, I mean this kind of chant that can have an objective in the world but in a very creative way like a jingle where you know what it means and you know where it goes. That really resonates with me and I think I’ve been trying to place myself with these missing points. Where I am in a relationship with studying and writing, what I am missing and especially in terms of the indigenous culture there is a lot of soundscapes that still prevail in the 5  Feminist Media based collective from Mexico, that has created sound interventions in the public space as political protest. https://www.instagram.com/fierasfierras/ (Last visited 11/24/2121)

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public space from the dancers that are always with their drums making indigenous dances. That’s there; it is in the surface, it’s in every corner. My mom danced, my mom is an indigenous dancer and that missing point is really something that I find very sad. For example, here in Montreal they speak a lot about reparations but those sounds are extinguished, I don’t hear them. I see a lot of indigenous first nation people in the streets but unfortunately in very bad conditions. I mean that is kind of the presence that I perceive and there are also first nation artists, of course, and they are having more and more power and more sounding but, of course, I don’t want to compare. It’s just another culture in Mexico and that is everywhere, it is everywhere and I can say that it is also a public domain where you just join a collective and then you are dancing and it is popular. I mean Mexico is also very complex because being indigenous also means that you will be relegated and you will be in the margins but also it is something that is gaining more relevance now not only among the newer nations but also in academia. I hope we are aware that first of all, we have to be aware that there is systemic racism that still exists in Mexico (at least where I come from), and second of all, that until we understand that we will not be able to actually move to decolonisation. I think there is work to do but in terms of sound I think many artists are now taking those roots and they are coming back to them and I find that extremely exciting which is why I am not interested much now in the Global North. I am interested in the Global South because I find very interesting intersections with another kind of feminism which is a feminism that calls itself trans-feminism and it comes out from Gloria Anzaldúa; there is also a feminism that speaks to their own language in Spanish you know, I just find that extremely fascinating and I can’t wait to actually go after this semester is over to do my fieldwork there with sound collectives. BC: Are you doing fieldwork in Mexico? AG: Yeah, I am going to start doing fieldwork with several collectives that I have in mind but now only in Mexico and Latin America. BC: How can you explain or delineate the indigenous listening approaches? How is it different from the dominant Global North practices of listening which is arguably an object-oriented approach to sound?

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AG: Okay, I am not just going to go to the commonplace and say ‘they listen to nature’—that is kind of always the commonplace and I had been getting into those common places because I am not indigenous; neither my grandmother was, even my grand-grandmother was Mestiza although her relationship with the Zapotec language, with the Zapotec sierra in the mountains, the indigenous Zapotec culture from this land was direct. Their lineage might not be purely indigenous but they do come from indigenous cultures. What I do remember is that they mentioned it to me and also I learn from my mom who approaches indigenous culture at the moment through sounding practices and dances, first of all—and yes this is going to sound clichéd—the ecological or their relationship with the non-­ human is every important at least to my grand grandmother and my grandmother. I remember when they narrated the soundscapes it was through the relationship of birds, bird calls, and also the relationship of walking in certain specific spaces and describing that which was mostly in the mountains. They were also giving me another kind of opposite side of this aspect which was immigrating to the city, being chaotic and being very stressful. However, there is a big part of indigenous groups that move and migrate to Mexico City and it’s a migration that is not documented that well. Maybe it is documented by scholars, but not by, for example, artistic practices that study ethnography. I think that would be very interesting specifically to document migratory indigenous groups that either go to Mexico or go to New York or Chicago because they do speak their language and there they don’t speak Spanish; they just go from Zapotec to English. What I remember, at least for my grandmother, is this kind of dichotomy of moving from what used to be the soundscape of a very non-human-touched environment to this very dense environment and there is always going to be bipolarity as I remember it. For example, with the case with my mom, her relationship with sound now that she is an Aztec dancers is that they do have a lot of chants and they do have a lot of drumming— the percussions are always drums, they build drums that are very basic or they are very resonant but aren’t necessarily experimental or anything like that. They do have a pattern; they do have a currency and storytelling narratives as well. It is always the song that is transmitted from one generation to the next generation and it has always a direct relationship with the goddess; so it is always a

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ritualistic perception in relation with the sound and is not so much about the individual but more about the collective and the community. It is always about the collective experience in which is in relation with the god that is sometimes the sun, the moon, and many other natural phenomena. So this is what I can say from my own perspective. I don’t study ethnomusicology based on indigenous cultures but I do have this connection with it and that is the most direct relationship that I can tell you of. BC: How do you like to identify yourself? Is it as a Mexican in the USA, a migrant in the USA, and when you are in Mexico are you also a nomadic entity coming from the USA? How are these different complexities of identities coalesce, or are you comfortable being nomadic? AG: Yeah, it is really complex to be honest because I grew up in the USA. I grew up for more than 22 years in the Global North and for 20 years in Mexico. I am Mexican but also I am this other being who is part of this culture and sometimes I am struggling too. I am not a Chicana because I didn’t grow up in the United States as such; I wasn’t born there and my parents are not immigrants but I do perceive myself as being at a crossroad that is having half and is very hybrid in the moment of creating. I cannot forget on one hand that I have my indexicality of sound within my Mexican relationship with that universe. Even now that I am in Canada, sounding is a part of my relationship and it is a part of my culture; just grabbing that speaker and ten other speakers and going on a procession is a part of my culture. Processions in Mexico are so common. For example, there are processions on Christmas for the day of the dead, So I am this hybrid form in hybrid practice. Also, my English is not perfect and I don’t want it to be perfect. But when I go to Mexico I also feel like a stranger now and people make fun of me and my language and refer to it as Gloria would say ‘deslenguada’,6 like I don’t have one single tongue. So I have issues with respect to identifying on the one hand, but I do know that I am a mestiza because I am part like a descendant of two things— 6  With the term deslenguadas, Anzaldúa refers to those who, like her live in-between two cultures, taking pride in speaking Spanglish. Pointing to her identity as a hybrid cultural being, in the book Borderlands, deslenguadas points to the ways in which language is inscribed by gender, class and ethnicity.

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one is indigenous and one is a settler from Spain living here as another settler in this country but never forgetting that. I can’t forget it; it is part of my everyday life, being a person of colour. In academia this has been hard and when I read you I nod my head. Yes, there are a lot of privileges, there is a lot of questioning, there is a lot of micro-aggression at least to me and sometimes one is too smart, too critical. So those identities are always in me like this. It is very difficult to pinpoint to anyone because they are also political. You are political; you get tokenised if you say you are Mexican; if I claim myself to be indigenous I would be ‘oof’. You know all these identities are always conflicting in questioning as well. BC: How does this complexity and hybrid intersections of identities manifest in your sound work? AG: I think in my sound work they are manifested. Especially right now as I am approaching intersectional feminism through voice-overs, I do a lot of voice-overs and I am very interested in the structure of the essay. I am interested in the essay that is not only through vocals or through oral histories. Also when I do the sound editing of my works, I try to find through my sound databases of soundscapes that I have—something that contradicts, something that explores one to one. I just recently did an augmented reality walk with the poems of Gloria Anzaldua in New York and I sound recorded some of the poems with my own voice as I was walking on the island. I then stopped at some places where I geo-located soundscapes from Brooklyn, from Sunset Park, and then I stopped through my own narrative at that moment. With my own voice (not pre-recorded), I started explaining the date of when I was recording, where is the location and then an explanation of my personal relationship with the idea of the border—the borderland/the crossroads. And I did that sequence three or four times in an argument walk that was 15 minutes long. So that was my way of approaching decolonisation of technology because most of the time when I see this technology being used, it is not always used as performance in a sound walk, but most of the times as an audio walk with big narratives. In a very few instances, I have seen/been hearing political work coming from creators or from narratives that are non-white. Most of the time what I see are audio walks that are implicit into the ­creator’s persona or narration but most of the time I see a lot of white creators using this kind of approach with technology. So to

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me amplifying these sounds and approaching writers that are queer but who are also speaking about decolonisation in their work is important and this is how I approach my own hybridism. BC: Do you think that your intervention in the field of sound studies and performance studies creates a kind of tension given that you are someone coming from outside the canon? AG: Right now I am actually writing a paper for a book that is going to be published on sound walking, and yes, I am trying through my work to connect these places. This is why I am talking so much about Gloria because I am actually making a comparative case of how she listens through her poetry and her literary work and how she uses walking in many of the aspects that she has created not just metaphorically symbolically but also through the action of going back and forth between cultures. I think that that kind of approach can create tension. Why? Because I am trying to look at others who are first of all not sound walking per se, but they are applying a lot of these metaphors of walking and listening from Chicano perspectives. It is not easy; you really have to read and micro-read all these poems. Also, another comparison that I am doing is the feminist Veronica Gago who is a scholar from Argentina speaking about this experience as a stopping all the activities and walking. To me, I am translating to that for the feminist drift or the feminist deriva. How can I approach Veronica Gago as walking out action within the idea of the drift—the very masculine drift—that I am so sick of reading most of the time? I am approaching others who are actually appropriating that in thinking and the derivative of it as a feminist tool. La deriva. So those are the inflections or the connections that I am making and I am trying to weave it into my writing and I am also quoting not necessarily from sound studies but from feminist studies, literary studies and thinkers such as Bell Hooks. I am so fascinated by her thinking on collectivity. In my work, I am trying to weave those; I am trying to find them and apply them in my sound walking. BC: What is the reason for choosing dérivé as a practice? Is it something to do with your own nomadic existence or something to do with coming out from the constraints of the white male-dominated practice of sound? AG: If I wanted to connect that, I would again be coming back to Mexico because in Mexico the walking practice is something that

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you simply do. If you have a car it is because you are middle-upper class or middle class but as a working-class person and as a woman nobody ever wanted to teach me how to drive and also as a working-­ class person I never had the chance to do it. So my only way of moving through the city was by walking. The idea that there is a concept that pretty much approaches all the practices that I was doing when I was walking as a teenager in the streets because that was my only way of moving fascinated me. However, as I was reading and writing more about the Flâneur and the Flâneuse, I was thinking, ‘Okay, but these are conceptions that are not so close to me anyway because first of all, I cannot have access to many places and second of all, as a woman, I am going to always have these fears that are embodied in my memory of being in Mexico’. So those are very challenging concepts but I want to grab these concepts and see how I can rescue the most valuable aspects of them but also adapt them into a methodology that serves my purposes. And the idea that I like about the dérivé is actually walking without a purpose or walking just for the pleasure of walking and for the desire of going somewhere when we don’t necessarily have directions or a map. But then we come back and we map it, and when we map it we talk about the psychogeography and the affectations that the city has on us in order to understand that cities are shaped by a system that is not thinking about all bodies—it is a very white patriarchal structure and gaze. It is through the experience of walking in a collective way that I can find that ‘richness’ (if it is a term that I can use, it is fine), but I want to evoke that term also with a charge that is not coming necessarily only from the situationists because situationists were all white men with a lot of time to do whatever they were doing which is not the case for everyone. BC: When you perform, how do you engage with the audience? Is it through a mode of community building or making the audience consume your work through a mode of entertainment? AG: That is a really good question. Lately, in my soundwalking practices (I mean, not lately I have been doing that for a while), I always walk, and it is not necessarily a dérivé when I sound; I walk very many times. I do the dérivé more when it is a pedagogical process where we are analysing, but when it is a sound walk it is more an itinerary of a practice that I already did. I already analysed

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and I already looked for clues—sonic clues—that are calling my attention. So when I walk with other people, I do stop at particular places that are denoting a particular effect—at least it denotes my first-person effect, but it is significant enough for other people to connect with—and most of the time I ask questions. So when we stop at one space, I say—‘What do you think about it?’, or—‘Let’s listen and then have questions’. Some of them might be questions that are related to the sound, some of them are questions related to the population that exists in that particular corner or the interactions, but I do ask for a more dialectical kind of walking where I approach face to face, I look at the eyes of the people and I always ask questions. I love doing that and I love asking indirect questions. It is like breaking the wall; it is like a Brechtianmovement where I am walking with a speaker and I stop and break the wall, then I break the character of the one carrying this speaker and then I ask questions. I guess it is also part of the alienation effect that I have been studying; I am very interested to see that when I have a speaker or a phone, and this is a technology that we are using to do this work, but this is not seductive. I don’t want to be seduced by the technology; the technology is just the medium that is carrying the sound but it shouldn’t be the goal to have this medium as a main narrator and that is why I like to do these live performances. People can back and hear the sound walk but for me, it is important to disrupt the use of technology as the main narrator and for me to be the one asking questions directly to the people. At the end of the walks, I always have a Question & Answer round where we discuss what we hear for another 20 minutes or so; I always give time for that. BC: It was wonderful to talk to you and to learn about your practice and to find out the resonances about the questioning of the Global South and the Global North. Just the last question—do you think Global North and the Global South is a binary formation? Is there a confluence that is possible to imagine? AG: I think there are places where they can overlap. For example, Tijuana. Now I am writing about las muertas de Juarez, which translates to the woman that we killed in Juarez. I mean that is like a very porous city; they are like a flux back and forward and people live in one place in Mexico and then they go to work to the other

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border or vice-versa. So these cultural cities, I think, are important places to look at because exactly in those places there are now those kinds of binaries. Those binaries are very broken and are fluxing day and night, and the populations house a flux, but they are also thinking in their own way, of who they are and how they belong to a place. I don’t think they belong here or there. I don’t even live in a physical border, but I live in a constant flux and that is a privilege for me as a transient person. I do believe that in those transient borders and those places of flux, there is a lot to learn and there is a lot to develop, to actually learn and practice from. As much as I hate this systemic racism that I experience in the North, I also understand that I have a better quality of life here. At the same time I want to run to Mexico all the time, or to the South, as I feel more fascinated by it and when I am there, I feel I am somebody else and I don’t have to pretend I speak English or I don’t have to pretend I am someone. I don’t know, I cannot explain it. When I am in Mexico I am myself in some other aspects and I imagine that a lot of immigrants who live within these borders have it the same. So it is not a binary; it is transient. And I am sure you experience that too as well. BC: Yes, when I go back to India I feel more alive and free but in Europe, I often find myself constrained by different kinds of gazes which always put me in a kind of identified box—South Asian, Indian, migrant, brown—these kinds of boxes. This limits the scope of my persona as an artist and human being. AG: You know that is why I love New York City, as crazy as it is, because everybody is transient. It is a city of immigrants and that is the only place in the USA where I don’t feel that oppression because I feel part of a very diverse group. It is just very difficult to live there. And the USA is the only place where I feel a little more liberated out of that box that I feel here, for example. BC: Yes, big cities are liveable in that sense of a commonality of existence like on the streets, and in the underground basement, when you go to catch a train or metro. But inside indoor situations in which you are under constant surveillance, the biases are exposed— the biases of the turbulent system itself, brown skinned/black skinned persons, are treated differently than the white people. It is not an innocent urban space where everybody can celebrate the

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urbanity together but there are different layers of surveillance ­systems and that layer is highly racially biased and colonial gazes are imbedded in these structures. AG: Yes, and especially in segregation; this segregation is so indexical and especially, for example, in Chicago. It was so rich talking to you and I am sorry I was mostly keeping the conversation because it is an interview, but through your questions, I reflected a lot about concepts that I haven’t put together. So thank you so much for those questions.7 BC: Yes, it was a pleasure. I think we can continue this conversation later on.

7  The following are addendums made to the interview by Amanda herself and are some reflections she wished to add post-interview:

1. I thought and witnessed the migration crisis while being a teacher of many students who came to North America as undocumented immigrants. Listening to their stories, working at NGOs and talking to my immigrant friends from the Global South remind me that I shouldn’t romanticise the border. The border in North and South America is also a space of violence; it is a militarised frontier by the Mexican and the United States governments. The space where drug cartels and human trafficators abuse and murder the most vulnerable. The border of Ciudad Juarez and New Mexico, where many women are killed. Their deaths are still impune and silenced, covering a state of corruption. On the border of Mexico and Guatemala, many immigrants, mainly from South America and Haiti, live in eternal limbo. This border is currently crossed by the Migrant Caravan, walking as a multitude to manifest the human rights violations committed by Mexico and the USA. Therefore the border as a concept can hold poetic thoughts but exists in a reality that we should not forget. 2. I came to the United States, fleeing from everyday gender violence. As an artist, I was tired of the sexism and misogynist attitudes that still prevail in the sound art scene. Therefore, when I return to Mexico, I still feel excluded by the classist and colorist attitudes that the artistic circuit—a system that is rooted in patriarchy and nepotism— holds. I still find similar attitudes here, but there I feel strangely alienated, knowing the cultural clues but unable to hold their weight anymore. So, I can neither find nor lose myself when I return.

CHAPTER 18

Abdellah M. Hassak

Abdellah M.  Hassak (Casablanca, Morocco) is a sound and new media artist, music producer and project manager. His sound work focuses on the use of digital technologies, computer coding for processing and sound interactivity. His work focuses on the cultural and artistic heritage, the traditional cultures, and the use of new technologies to facilitate communication. In his practice, he tries to connect tradition and technology to create spaces of cultural exchanges and interconnections. I wanted to have this conversation with Abdellah M. Hassak when I visited Morocco in 2019. But circumstances didn’t allow this to happen. We also missed the chance to meet in Berlin in person during his visit in Europe. This conversation ultimately took place over a series of emails. BC: How did you come to work with sound art and experimental music? Can you provide a personal background to begin with? AH: I was born in Casablanca. I grew up in an environment where the technical and artistic or musical languages were familiar to me thanks to my older brothers who were musicians and DJs. I was encouraged especially by my big brother with his instruments, his equipment and all that he transmitted to me in the form of love for sound and melody which was able to awaken in me this fine ear capable of listening, of listening well, of analysing and of Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Abdellah M. Hassak—AH. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_18

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self-­criticising in order to advance better. At 14, with the curiosity of a child and the passion of a beginner, I was progressing remarkably and I was riding my levels exponentially. When I was 16, I brought together a number of high school friends to have my own rock band; from one event to another, I was digging into the immense universe of music and sound, passionate about contemporary creativity, cultural research and underground life. Art filled me and I felt invaded by everything that has to do with nature and culture but also impressed by the mysteries of experimental electronic music. But I was still searching for ways to reconcile the musical traditions in Morocco with the electronic modernity— using new technologies, how to combine art and sound, culture, tradition and the language of electronic music. I started to work alone on modern instrumentations, samplings of voices and ethnic instruments in order to link new experimental music, electronic and so-­called ‘world music’. I am working today to constitute this bewitching fusion of contemporary sounds and ethnic songs to produce a retro-futuristic atmosphere and a psychedelic show where the magic of the sequences of sound samples come together to form a whole sonic world that takes us into unique universes and experience: it’s a great mental journey into the meanders of the mind. BC: What were the specific inspirational sparks for your interest in working with sound? AH: At the beginning when I started to work on experimental music and sound in my small studio, I was not too convinced about what I was doing, it was the same techniques, the same materials, the same software and the same instruments. Thereafter, I started to be interested in taking into consideration the sound dimension in a geographical context both in my sound landscape work for the curious ear, and the geography of noise / the noise of geography, but also music in its geo-social relationship. I think the act of leaving the studio to take the risk of confronting the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, even sometimes the fragile, kept me thinking about more real documentation of a given sound and musical and social situation. These kinds of recordings allow me to better understand the musical practice of a region or a country or the soundscape of a geographic space. Studio recordings often de-naturalise the sound practice—the sound that was created in a place; we can lose

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the place but this music was made to stay in this space, in a space with a specific context and social environment. Those sound recordings immortalise a moment of a unique and sensitive point in the life of those we don’t know, of social practices in times and places that we might ignore. BC: Who are the inspirations for your work with sound? Anyone or any source (person, label, organisation, group, band etc.) from Morocco, Africa, or the Arab world? AH: I can’t talk about just about one thing. Each period of my life had different influences. I was born in the mid-80s. During that time, there were a lot of New-Wave music, Rock and also local Pop music with traditional Moroccan influences played on radio and TV. During my high school and college years, I started playing as a Bass guitarist with some local bands. I always kept an open ear for other kinds of music. Towards the last two years of the 90s, I discovered the band Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects. Their album Shabeesation, on the Moroccan label Barraka El Farnatshi, inspired me a lot and changed many of the ideas I had about my musical vision. A few years later, the album Soldier of Midian by Badawi was released under the label ROIR—an album that got me into Dub, Ambient and Experimental music. These two albums opened my mind to a fairly rich, broad and free sound and musical background. And then I entered a phase of experimentation through the sounds emitted and heard, a new sound space in relation to their places and the different resonance, and out of a curiosity to discover the sound archives and create new archives. Directly after that, I started to produce Dub under the name DUBOSMIUM and sounds with my personal name. With time, I wanted to expand a little more into new kinds of music and started different projects with different names. Today, under the name Guedra Guedra, I am trying to explore the very important ethnic, social, cultural and linguistic identity that North Africa and a large part of Africa are sharing by challenging through music, topics like rhythm and polyrhythm, ritual practices, the practice of trance, the notion of memory and musical transmission in African nomadic society, and more. Guedra Guedra is a low-fi, polyrhythmic, tribal, organic and poetic, chaos project.1 1

 Label page: https://guedraguedra.bandcamp.com/

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How is the sound culture in Morocco different from the European/ Western canon in your opinion? The difference I even feel between a city and another in the same country. I think the difference does not exist only between the European/Western or North African and Arab world. We can talk about two things: an artistic approach and secondly, the context, which could be at the same time geographical, historical, political, social, and so on. In my work in general I find that contextualisation and territorialisation nourish my creations and deeply transform my contemporary artistic work. This contextualisation of practice serves first to define the field of research and then to build the field outside of my space of work or studio, and then reflect on artistic practice in a broader sense. What do you think of ‘sound canons’ in Moroccan and North African context? What are the traditional sounds in your opinion? Morocco and North Africa are the contexts and environments in which I think and produce my art—it is not just part of my work. But this context and this environment have many elements and they very much inspire my approaches—either through the intervention of cultural, social, political and philosophical aspiration or other elements. Notions of traditional sounds, cultural identity and memory are radically different from place to place as well as from certain practices to another. And each memory traces a history in the music of the oral tradition of the anamnesis of knowledge accumulated and inscribed in the body. Do you locate certain tendencies in your own work drawing ideas from the traditional sound cultures in Morocco and North Africa? Are there any? Seriously I cannot specify one thing—it depends on the project, research and medium. At the moment on one of my musical projects which is more based on sound research in traditional sound cultures in Morocco, North Africa and in all of Africa, it’s about the notion of the tribe as a universal social phenomenon that inspired the producer of my work for the creation of my third album and new project under the pseudonym Guedra Guedra— Son of Sun (EP)—Vexillology (new LP).2 It is from the angle of the

2  Review of Vexillology on The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/ mar/05/guedra-guedra-vexillology-review

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history of African societies, inspired by the concept of ethnocentrism as an expression of the exaltation of tribal consciousness in a contemporary musical universe that created this new contemporary music. The work is based on an immersive and chaotic musical arrangement inspired by the first epithets applied to the African continent such as savagery and barbarism. They refer as much to Sub-Saharan African as to Barbaric culture and make reference to images of human animalism. Guedra Guedra explores chaotic tribalism with the aim of reactivating different African folklores under a new musical energy. It proposes a synthesis of its pan-African sensibility and a full immersion in the traditional rhythms of North Africa. Ultimately, this album is a temporary transposition of the tribal culture—a contemporary imprint that involves the listener. How do you conceptualise the idea of time (e.g. duration) in your work? Personally, I find that time and the present are perpetual. And the past, the present and the future are only the same reality. Time rarely takes a place in my work; I could dice to write time or specify a duration in my artwork, but for some reasons far from artistic work—rather, only for archive management or adaptation of the piece to a precise artistic framework. How do you conceptualise the idea of space (e.g. perspective, depth of field)? Space is a fundamental question on which I reflect in several moments in my artistic work, starting with the research space up to the methodology in space and the invention of the territory (including, of course, the research and storytelling and narration in space). But I also find that sound art—as intangible art—is by its nature opposed to this notion of relation with space because a sound work which fills a space with sound gives the sensation that nobody is anymore in the space—he or she is in another space in the same place. How do you conceptualise the idea of improvisation in your work? Improvisation is a form of spontaneous experience and performative structuring. For me, improvising is to say all what we want to see, hear and think collectively. Improvisation is so important in my work because it allows me to say what I like to say, but also to say what others want to say and to say what we were not able to say or do.

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BC: Do you work with ritual elements from Moroccan, African or Arabic traditional music/sound such as Egyptian influenced Chaabi or African Islamic spiritual music, Gnawa?3 How do you like to relate to these religious, social and customary aspects of sound practice, and how do you innovate on your own terms? AH: Before borders were drawn during the colonial period, Africa was comprised of a multitude of beautiful and profound rites, explaining the presence of interconnections in rhythms and folklores. In North and West Africa—also in the Middle East—tribes share a collective and spontaneous cultural practice that fits into all the acts of daily life; lullabies, work songs and other rituals—now threatened to be forgotten. Nomadism led to the intertwining of cultures, origins, forms and colours. Borders remain a largely exogenous concept to the peoples of North-West Africa and are hardly accommodated by independent states, populations, rebels, and smugglers. Tribalism continues to gangrene the continent while the tribe in its essence and in its cultural dimension has disintegrated without anything replacing its structures. In this context, I drive many projects with the ambition to explore and deeply research about Moroccan and African ancestral rhythms and rituals. I was intrigued by the shared collective sounds and spontaneous cultural practice of tribes from different regions of the continent. My approach builds on a constant work on field recordings: I believe that social and musical practices are tightly linked to their specific contexts and spaces that might be de-naturalised in the studio. Real documentation of these traditions requires then, a real confrontation to their unpredictability and their fragility in their natural universes. My last works in these three years in sound art and also music explore the themes of Afro-futurism, spirituality and space in an elegant manner. They are an explanation of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of these sonic universes to produce music where everything within it dances to a cosmic music whose tunes and rhythm echo the words of the spiritual, and to create a temporary space that depicts societies in which people can live in equality.

3  Gnawa refers to Moroccan and West African Islamic religious songs and rhythms. Gnawa performances combine ritual poetry with traditional music and dancing.

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The idea of ‘sound art’ or ‘sonic arts’ is departing from a typical Western musical tradition where tonal structures are discreet and quantifiable. How do you interpret the Moroccan systems of sound culture and an oral transfer of sound? Do these ideas reflect in your artwork, and how? AH: My project Mahattat Radio is an ephemeral and temporary research and production radio station, which sneaks into listening to archives, places and people from different public and private places (cafe, house, art centre, schools, festivals, public space, etc.).4 The radio aims to offer an alternative, archivist and citizen media for Moroccan society and is focused on transdisciplinary and radio sound creation. At the beginning, it was an idea to know and appropriate the history of my country—a key factor for the proper development and functioning of a society. Alongside national and official archives, which shape a certain vision of history, for me, there are other archives—those of citizens, which still remain to be explored. Therefore, since the beginning of this radio project I have worked with a lot of people from Moroccan society seriously since my first experiences, there were all the time of fluidity and flexibility with the citizens. I think that the power of audio is its invisibility and its futurity. It is an act in context with space to create a personalised dialogue with the people and the territory concerned. In my experience by practising sound art and radio, the force of interaction in Morocco is that it is giving the voice. And what this medium creates as a social link is to value individuals through the right to speak and the democratisation of the collective writing of history—more particularly, of the individuals who have little or no voice within our Global societies. BC: When you use electronics or recording technology, how do you like to replace the social, ritual, mystical, improvisatory, and ephemeral ideas of performing arts embedded in the Moroccan thoughts around sound? AH: In my work, there are several direct and organic links to archives and cultural, artistic and poetic heritages as well as their ­crossbreeding. Starting from traditional cultures, the intervention of new technology and digital has been to offer a remixed version where contemporary means of communication are used to pro4

 Listen: https://soundcloud.com/mahattatradio

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mote sharing and exchanges, privileged vectors of rapprochement and interconnection between people. The principle in my work is to offer an audio and audible work, and not an audio with electronic or digital work. Whether its techniques used digital, acousmatic or analogue, it is not a question of creating by confrontation between the sound and technology. I like the audio that can be listened to and keeps its organic, embedded side. BC: Do you think there is a confluence of cultures between Morocco and Europe, between North Africa and Europe, and between the Global North and the Global South in your work? How do you identify yourself? AH: Identity can be understood as an evolutionary dynamic by which the social actor, individual or collective gives meaning to his or her being in a specific country. But I find that what all cultures share in a way or another points to common or less practices that are adapted over time, I find that with the intensification of human movements on a planetary scale, the development of the Internet and the ease of communication and consumption of cultures, there is no longer any question today of confusing cultures, identity and territory. About me: I feel the Moroccan, the European, the North African, the African, the Oriental and the worldwide human. There was a text by Edward Said, ‘Out of Place: A Memoir’ that I read so long ago and that inspired me a lot: ‘An identity is something that a person chooses and is not given to him, and it is better that one does not belong anywhere’. BC: What is your comment on Western colonisation of Moroccan sound and listening? How do you like to decolonise sounds in your own work if that is possible? AH: First, as a Moroccan, what bothers me the most before colonialism is the influence of Western cultural imperialism on the practice of Moroccan artists where it becomes the production of Orientalism. This process firstly aims to modify lifestyles to make them resemble that of the dominant culture; I find that a very dangerous mechanism of cultural colonisation. In facing this, I try to make a poetic resistance to decolonise the spirit, decolonise the act and ­subsequently offer a new page of discussion and global and reciprocal cultural exchange.

CHAPTER 19

Syma Tariq

This conversation was facilitated by email exchanges in which I sent Tariq a set of questions, and she responded via email. We talked at length around these questions and shared our research respectively. BC: How did you come to work with sound and particularly in sound art, radio (and experimental music)? Please provide a personal background. ST: My first forays into sound were through DJ-ing, putting on experimental music and DIY club nights. It was a self-taught, self-­initiated thing. In 2013 a magazine I was writing for had also started a radio station—Monocle24—so I taught myself how to do radio as I needed money! I bought a cheap Zoom H2, downloaded the free Audacity software and figured it out. So I just started pitching stories. I was living in Lisbon at that time, freelancing as a print and online journalist, and coming back to London sometimes to do copy-editing at a newspaper. In the five or six years of doing radio I was interviewing, scripting and editing reports on design, business, culture and politics. At this time I was also thinking more about my own personal origins and roots in Pakistan and India, and reading up on the 1947 Partition as a result. In 2015 I was invited Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Syma Tariq—ST. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_19

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by curator Natasha Ginwala to make an audio document that corresponded with a travelling public programme called ‘Ancestors’, which was a collateral event associated with an exhibition she curated at the 16th Venice Biennale ‘My East is Your West’.1 ‘Ancestors’ travelled to four South Asian cities, inquiring into questions of geographic connectivity, colonial history, traditions of hospitality, acculturation and oral memory in the Indian subcontinent.2 This was my first radio art or sound art project, which I titled A Thousand Channels after Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (‘one way ashore, a thousand channels’).3 It is revived as a multi-­ form online radio project which is currently part of the 2022 edition of the Sri Lankan interdisciplinary arts festival Colomboscope: Language is Migrant.4 BC: What were the specific triggers for your interest in working with sound? ST: In terms of music, I really wanted to create celebratory community spaces, particularly for LGBTQIA+ and people of colour where I was living. I also just wanted to play bangers—particularly blending music from the Global South with Western styles of dance music, and providing a platform for others who didn’t fit into rigid white music scenes. In terms of the rest, I became fascinated with recorded speech after my first few radio reports—the process of recording, collecting and manipulating other people’s voices became an ethical as well as professional concern for me. The idea of neutrality, balance and style in journalism is often taken for granted. But when you hear a story as opposed to reading it, these ideas become more complex, and I think that crosses over as well into other disciplines, especially oral history. A Thousand Channels led me to the research project I am currently undertaking at CRiSAP [Creative Research into Sounds Arts Practice], a research centre based at University of the Arts London, which explores the 1947 Partition as a sonic

1  See event details on e-flux: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/30085/my-eastis-your-west-a-collateral-event-for-the-2015-venice-biennale/ 2  More information is available on the Gujral Foundation website: https://gujralfoundation.org/show-item/my-east-is-your-west-a-collateral-event-of-the-56th-venice-biennale/ 3  Glissant, Édouard (1997). Poetics of relation. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. 4  See: https://www.colomboscope.lk/athousandchannels

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c­ ondition through its archival forms and processes.5 My ongoing practice, ‘Partitioned Listening’, was born out of the frustrations I have found with history, oral history and the archive, where sound and listening is relegated under the visual and textual primacy of postcolonial documentation. My real interest in sound is actually about listening: the contingencies and complex relationships involved in listening to voices, particularly in the contexts when they become ‘artefacts’ for event-memory. BC: Who are the inspirations for your work with sound? Anyone from South Asia, or specifically from Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent? ST: In terms of music, my biggest inspiration is Manara—a British-­ Pakistani DJ, who currently has a show on BBC Asian Network called Pure Spice.6 She is incredibly talented, and her blends are phenomenal—Urdu Ghazals, Bollywood film music mixed with garage, house, and the guilty pleasures we grew up listening to in our cousins’ cars. She invites guests who would never otherwise get mainstream airplay—Tamil producers, for example. Broadening out what Asian music means on somewhere like the BBC, which is so North Indian-focused, is really powerful. I find her approach to music incredibly authentic and knowledgeable. In terms of sound practice in South Asia, I love the work of Shahana Rajani, a Karachi-­ based researcher and friend who incorporates into her work storytelling and public history, particularly focusing on the erasures and multiple violence ingrained in processes of displacement and development. Zahra Malkani, also Karachi-based and who has also worked with Shahana as part of Karachi La Jamia, has a developing audio practice where she explores the sonic seascapes of Sindh and Balochistan. In terms of my own academic and artistic thinking, I am indebted to CRiSAP—especially Professors Cathy Lane and Salomé Voegelin, and colleagues Irene Revell, Louise Marshall and Lee Ingleton—for the supportive and expansive environment in which to think around sound that went beyond the normal parameters of sound art. Without their experienced and radical sonic

 https://www.crisap.org/people/phd-students/syma-tariq/  Read: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06s0dqs and https://ra.co/reviews/ 24088 5 6

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thinking (as well as their support and friendship) I really wouldn’t be doing what I am doing today! How is the sound culture in South Asia different from the European/Western sound canon in your opinion? I can’t speak for all of South Asia, but my experience in Pakistan (and personal background as diaspora) tells me that the sound culture is quite different—even though there are less books, exhibitions and university courses that centre sound, so it’s less of a discipline than say music is, but I find the way that people are really compelled to think about and listen to music and speech in Pakistan makes it a culture that really respects and relishes orality. Listening is different in Urdu, for example, the way the grammar is needs you to kind of have to listen until the end of the sentence to really know what someone is saying. This already means a completely different way of listening compared to European languages! The diversity in Pakistan itself—linguistically, ethnically, and sonically—is really incredible and deserves more attention. What do you think about a sound canon in South Asian context—a canonical body of sound works and thoughts? What are the traditional and ritual sounds in your opinion? I know that Hindustani classical music is probably way more over-­ emphasised—even fetishised—than other forms and variations in the subcontinent. I find it more interesting to think about how we define ‘traditional’, and why we uphold that. Do you locate certain tendencies in your own work drawing ideas from the South Asia canon or some of the traditional aspects of sound cultures in the Global South? Are there any? Not yet. For me perhaps the only South Asian ‘cultural’ influence is the sense of deep sociality of listening and speaking—of sitting in a room for hours with other people as a form of entertainment as well as community gathering. It is an intimate sonic space that means a lot to me. How do you conceptualise the idea of time (duration, rhythm, temporality) in your work? Partition is usually categorised as an event—a happening that has a finite beginning and end. My conception of Partition as a ‘sonic condition’ disputes this categorisation, and draws on Salomé

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Voegelin’s ideas of ‘sonic timespace’—which is an exchange, rather than a render. Timespace ‘does not measure or survey a place but is place as sonic production that sounds as invisible mobility through which I hear its geography that triggers the mapping of my auditory imagination’ (Voegelin, 2014: 24–25).7 This geography is not a map, a static representation, but agency, ‘a practice of walking and listening, doing and redoing. There is no measure, there is no map, just the present materiality unfolding in our ears—hearing our own geography’. To conceive Partition as a sonic condition, ‘place as sonic production’, is an attempt to encompass the devastating singularity and historical dissipation of Partition that distinguishes it from other traumatic histories of imperial rule and division, but also connecting it to them in ways that have not already been attempted. Gyanendra Pandey’s critique of how Partition has historically been treated as an ‘event’, a finite moment in time, is pertinent here. Pandey argues that the fixing of Partition as an event—a line drawn, a calendar date, the suddenly spectacular/destructive birth of two nations—‘falsely consigned the resulting violence as a subject outside of the historian’s remit’. So Partition can mean many things across many timescales. Considering it as a sonic condition in which aural archival impulses are not merely present but somehow frame the story while being constantly on the move allows for even more relationality and extension. Through my ongoing series of audio essays Partitioned Listening, I consider Partition as a living, moving, sonic geography, that has and in some ways always will partition our listening, but sounding this partitioning is a creative attempt to deal with questions of duration, rhythm, repetition, the ‘always already listened to’ (Stoever) and temporality. Pandey’s complication of the boundaries between ‘event’ and ‘interpretation’ can be read as an expansion of Partition’s timespace. Achille Mbembe’s construction of the postcolony as one that embodies many temporalities—a refusal of non-linear models of time in favour of the phenomena of what he calls ‘time of existence and experience of entanglement’—is relevant here. Mbembe conceives that the postcolonial present as experience of time ‘is precisely that moment when different forms of 7  Voegelin, Salomé (2014). Sonic Possible Worlds Hearing the Continuum of Sound. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

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absences become mixed together: absence of those presences that are no longer so that one remembers (the past), and absence of those that are yet to come and are anticipated (the future)’. This time is not a series, but an ‘interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones’. Applying Mbembe’s temporal reworking of the postcolony to Partitioned Listening is further enriched by the temporal oscillations that occur throughout my research. The plural movements of history that can be found in the archive—through its progressive exchanges of labour, collection of objects, recordings, enactment of protocols and systems of knowledge—also occur within the oral history interview itself. According to influential oral historian Alessandro Portelli, the oral narrative can ‘contain substantial shifts in the “velocity” of narration, that is, in the ratio between the duration of the events described and the duration of that narration’.8 In an oral history, several years can be covered in a matter of minutes, whereby a day can be devoted several hours in its retelling. BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of space (aural perspective, depth of field, sonic space) in your work? ST: For my research, the temporally plural nature of Partition is composed not only of voices kept in sound and the postcolonial subjects engaged in the production of these archival voices (so, oral historians, artists, archivists), but also my own ‘sonic subjectivity’ as a researcher whose (temporal) interlocution with the material and the processes of its production affects Partition as a category of understanding as well—and as a timespace. BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of improvisation in your work? ST: Recording people speaking actually involves an improvisatory impulse, especially when you’re recording out of a traditional interview setting, which is something I am drawn to more. As I also work with field recordings too that can include people’s voices, I find it interesting to think about improvisation through recording. Actually, I’ve only ever considered it with regards to performance. BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of attention in your work?

8  Portelli, Alessandro (2010). The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. New York: State University of New York Press.

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ST:

Listening is all about attention, and when it comes to listening to Partition, it is about endurance too, because it is a complex thing. Attention when it comes to working with sound in this way is about care as well as imagination. A lot of the listening I do (and will have to do as part of my currently delayed fieldwork) will be quite monotonous, long and repetitive as I am going into archives that just hold so much audio of people speaking for a long time—about banal subjects as well as difficult ones. I find it interesting to follow my own attention as I listen, as well as investigating what others— archivists, interviewers, researchers, artists—pay attention to when they listen. Partitioned Listening is a project that veers between broadcast, sound art, oral/history and academic argument, and so resists narrative and disciplinary stability. It is produced, following the philosopher Nikita Dhawan, as taking the issue of representation at the heart of the politics of speech and silence—‘who speaks for whom alongside what is being said’ (Dhawan 2012: 48). The ‘epistemic violence’ of imperialism, exemplified through its archival regime, is not just economic and territorial, but a ‘subject-­ constituting project’ (Ibid., 50).9 The liberal democratic idea of speech as always and already politically enabling then needs to be questioned, it needs to be paid attention to. BC: The idea of sound art departs from a typically Western musical tradition where tonal structures are discreet and quantifiable; how do you interpret the Indian sub-continental system of microtonality that is ‘immeasurable’ and there’re ‘unknowable’ hidden between microtones? Do these ideas and other Indian sonic aspects reflect in your work? ST: Although I am not yet making work on this issue, I am very interested in this. For example, the note ‘A’ is used as a universal tuning standard, which denigrates the whole in-betweenness or ‘atonality’ of certain Indian notes, right? Though I’m no expert, I find these questions really interesting. BC: Do you think there is a confluence of cultures, between East and West, and between Global North and Global South in your work? How do you identify yourself? Does your artistic and curatorial work reflect on these issues? 9  Dhawan, Nikita (2012). Hegemonic Listening and Subversive Silences: Ethical-political Imperatives. Critical Studies 36.

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ST:

My subjectivity, as a British Pakistani, is definitely ingrained in the work that I do. For radio art projects, for example, I really try to always push voices and ideas from the Global South. As a British-­ Pakistani and also someone who is queer, I definitely feel that I occupy many different identities and histories that cross over into and through each other, including ‘East’ and ‘West’. As someone who is also concerned with coloniality—rather than jumping on the ‘decolonial’ train—as an ongoing and continuous frame for knowledge formation, albeit from my privileged position as a London-­ based, British passport holder, I cannot disentangle these things from any work that I do. The ethics of representation and the platforming of certain voices and ideas sort of comes naturally. My own personal feelings/politics and the ways in which I work are intertwined, I cannot really separate them. BC: What is your comment on European colonisation of South Asia and its impact on the sound culture? How do you like to decolonise sound and listening in your work, if possible? ST: The first ethnomusicologists in India were British military officers. Their morals, Christian standards and lack of appreciation for the difference of Indian music compared to their own forms of ‘high art’ contributed to their writing of theoretical, musicological and religious nationalisms over the bodies, practices and histories (of music, but of everything else too) from our region. This erasure will probably take a lot more time to undo, to ‘decolonise’ if you want to use that term—for example, our understandings of Khayal are very much about British conceptions of Indian religions. We all know how British ‘knowledge’ of the religions in India ended up. Coloniality is central to my current doctoral research and my interest in aural archives after the 1947 partition. The Western colonisation of South Asia still has deep ramifications—from the looting and exploitation, identification and categorising of different ethnicities and divide and rule policies to the erasure of gender fluidity and the obvious drawing of physical borders. Conceiving Partition as a sonic condition allows for greater considerations of its simultaneity, complexity and movement compared with conventional historical frameworks—it accommodates for countless lines of movement and change, and that includes movements of resistance to these colonial categories.

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BC: How do you engage with the audience? Do you like to entertain them? ST: I never perform in front of a live audience, unless I’m DJing! Unexpected vocal mixing across genres and a lot of bass does the work for me in that regard.

Bibliography Dhawan, N. (2012). Hegemonic Listening and Subversive Silences: Ethical-­ Political Imperatives. Critical Studies, 36. Voegelin, S. (2014). Sonic Possible Worlds Hearing the Continuum of Sound. Bloomsbury Publishing.

CHAPTER 20

Siamak Anvari

Siamak Anvari is a composer and sound artist based in the Netherlands. He was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1981 and studied composition at the Art University of Tehran. Being interested in electro-acoustic music, he moved to the Netherlands to study at the Institute of Sonology at Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. This conversation was documented inside café De Zwarte Ruiter in the downtown Den Haag, the Netherlands, in a winter afternoon 2019. In some moments, the voice was not legible enough while being drowned in the activities of the café. I have previously worked with Siamak Anvari and his organisation Azimuth to develop multichannel sound spatialisation during my solo exhibition at Quartair Contemporary Art Initiative Den Haag, and during my concerts at Studio Loos. In this conversation, we focused on Anvari’s coming to work with sound and a tension between sonic traditions of East and West. BC: Well, so to introduce the project, it’s a postdoc research that I started in 2018, when I was at the American University of Beirut where I got a one year position. But it wasn’t limited to one year; I

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Siamak Anvari—SA. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_20

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have pursued it on my own because my position and the contract ended, but it’s leading to a book. There are three different phases of investigation. The first phase is a sonic ethnography: more than interviewing, it is a series of dialogues and conversations with artists from the Global South, with a broad perspective, including Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Latin America—specifically what is termed ‘non-West’. This non-West was affected by Europe’s colonisation, and mass migration occurred from there. I try to develop non-Western ontologies and epistemologies in the field of sound. I am not trying to ‘map’ sound practices in these regions, as ‘mapping’ is a colonial objective approach; when you map and make straight documentation, you adhere to a Western cartographic method of area studies. But I aim to listen together with the sound practitioners who are uncovering the discursive elements such as finding out different trajectories of practices, and different layers of listening that developed historically, and through this first stage— the stage of investigation in the form of the conversations with the artists themselves—we discover untapped knowledge systems. The second phase is listening and reading these texts and conversations for figuring out the premises or entry points of the idea of a decolonial sound practice in the Global South with a broader perspective of intercultural confluence. And the third phase is writing these illuminating thoughts and ideas down and sharing them with peers across the globe. The first stage will continue from 2018 to 2021, editing the texts through 2021 and early 2022. I plan to read them again, transcribe them, reread them and listen to them and by 2022–2023 I will start writing. Maybe in 2023, I will finish the manuscript. SA: Okay, sounds good. BC: So far, I have interviewed a few artists, and will have conversations with artists from Africa—Morocco, Egypt, Kenya, Mozambique; Middle East—Iran, Lebanon, Syria; South Asia—India, Sri Lanka; and Latin America—Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Mexico. It is an ongoing conversation. SA: Okay. BC: I have to invest in more time. I am lucky that you are here, also many others. I couldn’t go to Iran, which is obvious since you are here, and I am here. I explore this opportunity to have this discussion.

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SA: That’s good. BC: The first thing is to know about your own trajectory in your sound practice. If you can start with your coming to sound and listening, to music, your background a little bit, we can move from there. SA: My background, well, I started playing instruments from teenage years and just really in an immature way. I was just playing instruments, thinking while I was playing by myself and then trying to figure out how it worked, and then it just continued through me for years until really late when I decided I wanted to be a composer. From that point, I started to seriously pursue the academic way of studying composition. But, yeah, so then I studied composition. I prepared myself for a couple of years for the entrance exam because I had to learn harmony, counterpoints, theory, a lot of stuff. BC: The Western music theory. SA: Yeah, the thing is it is basically in the Western style, the composition studies in Iran. There are a few Iranian subjects too, but the fundamentals of the program is based on the Western way of composing music, so you learn harmony, counterpoint, music theory, form analysis and all these other stuff. BC: It took place in Iran, so you were preparing when you were in Iran. SA: Yeah, I ran through private lessons with different teachers and then I prepared myself for this. I was lucky because I was studying for my bachelors, in the same university, so the music department was there—the next door department—so I was in contact with them, and it was easy to know what’s happening there. And then after this preparation, I did the exam; it was really long consisting of four different parts, but anyway, I entered and started composing music. It was 2–3 years long because it was a master’s program. And then there was the time when I was interested in electronic music and there was not a lot of knowledge there. I mean there was just a little bit, as you can read everything in the books. There was just one feature studied in the United States and another one in Austria (which came a bit later and they have some knowledge about it), but it was all new and very exciting thing. That was the reason that, after I graduated from there in composition, I started to look for a place to go to for studying electro-acoustic music. BC: Which institution was it? SA: Where did I study? It’s called the Art University of Tehran. BC: Music Department?

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Music Department, yeah; that is the reason I am here in Europe. I came here, I did a one year course in Sonology to see if that’s really what I wanted to do and I did the master’s programme and now music along with the PhD. BC: Did you do another master’s? SA: Yes. BC: You spent a relatively longer time in Iran until your master’s, right? SA: Yes. BC: Unlike many of the students who come here to do bachelor’s, you came when you finished master’s, so maybe you had a longer duration of time to draw from the Iranian sonic and musical traditions? SA: Yes. BC: Can you mention some early influences from the Western canon as well as the Iranian canon? SA: Yeah, there is always the influence in the air. It’s not if you want to or not; you are hearing and enjoying their music, and you hear their music, so they go parallely together, and they are always there with Iranian music. BC: So the influence was in the air? SA: Yeah, for Iranian Music. But as for Western music, it was something to study more, because it wasn’t really in the air. (Laughs). So yeah, there were translated books in English about big works of classical history and I started to pick up those books and I was collecting CDs—I still have a lot of classical music CDs in my home. So yeah, that was a way to slowly learn about classical music and Western music. BC: Did you also learn electronic music later on? SA: Yeah, later on, also. But the Iranian music is always there, you hear it from the radio, TV, etc. It’s always there. So it’s not like a big effort to learn it in schools. BC: Did you have some influential figures at that time that you followed? In the sense that some canonical or seminal figures, such as a composer or a theorist or a musician, that you were drawn to? SA: Like in Iranian music? There are important people in Iranian music that really affected me like, Hossein Alizadeh, if you know him.1 He’s the one who also studied Western music and he also has some 1  Hossein Alizadeh (born in Tehran in 1950) is considered to be one of the most important figures in contemporary Persian music. He comes from a traditional musical training.

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orchestral music for Western instruments. I was really touched by his music and his rare working attitude. There is this famous singer, Shajarian, and he is a great master of singing. I can mention these; and there is also Kayhan Kalhor, he plays this sort of bow fiddle which is a vertical fiddle; it is a traditional Iranian fiddle.2 He was also a very influential figure of Iranian music for me, as someone who is taking it a bit further than a traditional context. BC: What made you interested in Western classical music, particularly electronic music? Was there a kind of rapture or you were suddenly attracted to a particular kind of music? Did you hear something on the radio? What was the moment when you had your interest sparked? SA: I think that the big moment was the moment that I decided to study composition seriously, because before that I, of course, heard things here and there but not really in a conscious way, you know? I heard that piece but I didn’t know who exactly composed it. From the moment that I started to study, then it was a sort of conscious study. It was like, ‘Okay, what should I listen to?’ Pick a book and say, ‘Okay this is music history, we need to start from here and listen to that’. And then the periods of music—this is classical music, this is romantic music, so looking at it as a sort of historical order. It was like a study practice for me at the beginning. Just trying to know about something that I didn’t before. BC: Did you, at that time, look at the territories of the situated sonic traditions such as temporality, spatiality, tonality or tuning systems and the textural aspects of Iranian music? Were you aware of the differences at the time—for example, Iranian sonic tradition, Middle Eastern musical tradition, Maqām, and their structural differences with the Western traditions? Did you demarcate these differences? SA: Maybe not in a conscious way, but I can just mention that I found Western classical music really difficult to relate to, especially the classical period. Baroque music was very beautiful for me, R ­ omantic 2  Kayhan Kalhor is a composer of Kurdish and Persian classical music and a member of the Persian/Kurdish folk and classical ensemble Ghazal and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. He is also virtuoso player on the kamancheh, setar, and Persian violin. He is globally renowned for his original works, his interpretations of traditional music, and his collaborations with other classical and modern musicians.

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music was also easier to understand, but classical music like Mozart, in particular, was really really boring for me. I couldn’t appreciate it; it was too simple for me. And then these major-minor movements, I couldn’t appreciate it. It was a bit of a challenge in the beginning to understand those specific areas. It was interesting in that contemporary music was easier for me to relate to rather than classical Viennese style. And also Baroque music, and before that, it was also even easy for me like Renaissance music I found really interesting and easier to listen to. BC: Modal music. SA: Yeah, modal music, because that is closer to Iranian music. That was sort of challenging, facing Western music. BC: There were confluences between sonic traditions; for example, Debussy—the way he dealt with sound was something conceptually and tonally borrowed from Javanese music, Gamelan and South Asian music. American Minimalist School was based on its primary protagonist’s Indian teacher, Pandit Pran Nath. John Cage’s practice is informed by Buddhism and Chinese philosophies. There were ample instances of such confluences. Was contemporary music more relatable to you because of this open-endedness, this global exposure? SA: Yeah, that could be. I never thought about it this way. BC: And then you came to the Netherlands after your master’s? SA: Yeah. BC: You already had some knowledge, acquired knowledge—you had mastered Western classical composition. SA: Yeah, so I just went through all the subjects, not as a bachelor’s student, but as someone who would spend more time as a master’s student—just to check everything and see what’s happening. It was like a rather short but intensive experience with all the subjects of Western music. I remember always my harmony teacher was saying we learn harmony not to use it, you know not to use the harmony. BC: Your teacher in Iran? Why? SA: Yeah. Because he was saying we are learning eighteenth-century harmony basically. He says the idea is not to just follow the rules, it’s just to know the rules and not to follow them. BC: To break them? SA: Yeah, to break them. That was also really challenging. During my study, there was a very big thing that everyone talked about, which

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was to find your Iranian roots and use them in your music—the identity in a way. And that was really a big theme of those days, I don’t know how it is at the moment. The main sort of thing that the older generations wanted to give to the new generation was that you shouldn’t just look at Bach and Beethoven and just do something in that direction, you need to also get an element. That was a thing. And then you would see a lot of examples of people doing different things, trying to put things and elements together. For instance, picking an Iranian melody or a mode and trying to harmonise it with Western harmonies. It is like writing a concerto (the idea of which comes from the Western tradition because in Iranian music they don’t have such an idea to have an orchestra and a solo instrument), but then writing a concerto for Iranian instruments and orchestras. There were a lot of these kinds of examples. I was also under this influence and felt the need to try to find and do something in this way. There were a lot of discussions about Iranian harmony, there are also books in Iran about how we can talk about Iranian harmony and there were also a lot of discussions that there is no harmony in Iranian music; it’s not vertical, it’s just a horizontal way of thinking about music. A lot of discussions like this. Some people said, ‘yeah it’s not possible, someone is just trying to make it happen’ and then sometimes the results were really not that great. Being under those influences I also did more or less the same thing, but I didn’t want to take something from the modal system of Iranian music. So I went a bit back further and I picked a sort of singing tradition from years ago which is called Tahrir and it’s from the Western area of Iran and it’s a way of singing basically. Shepherds used to sing like this; it’s a primitive way of singing and the way that you use your voice to sing. BC: Using the grains too. SA: Yeah, just a sort of special technique with which you sing really high notes and come back to the main pitch and then you use really high pitched ornaments to go around this central pitch. So that was something that I found really interesting and I tried to analyse that and see what’s happening. I did this as much as possible with the Western system of notation. Based on that, I tried to compose an orchestral piece and that was the final project when we started composing the orchestral piece for a full orchestra, a choir and solos. Because when you know no one is going to perform it, then you do

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it as fully as possible because it doesn’t matter. So I also tried to do the same thing in a way—to take an element from Iranian culture and music and sort of present it in a contemporary way. I still feel a bit sort of naïve when I look at it now but, yeah, that was the strong influence of that time for all of us that were studying music. BC: And then you came to Den Haag, and you spent one year in Sonology experimenting not in a compositional way but more with sound, right? SA: Yeah, yeah. But also just seeing that the first encounter was full of new things so it just takes some time to observe and then just take all those new things and see what you like and what you don’t. But I was lucky to have compositional studies and I had good teachers there. In that sense, I felt quite secure in terms of composition techniques. I was looking at different new kinds of mediums or new tools to work with because I also had problems with instrumental music in a sense. I can put it in this way: to work with an instrumentalist I always found difficult and in the end, I never found it satisfactory in terms of what I wanted to make happen. So in a way, electronic music for me was a way that I take all the control and I do exactly what I want to do. BC: More from an authorial position? SA: No, not like that. That’s the way I am saying it. What I say is correct but just being able to do what I really want to do was not most of the time possible while working with an instrumentalist. In that sense, I found it very liberating to work with electronic music. BC: How was the moment when that shift from music to sound took place for you? Taking the normative structure of music to open it up for electronic engineering of sounds; was there such a moment? SA: From the beginning, it was not a really big difference for me. Yes, electronic sound was a new thing but I didn’t really consider it as a different category. It was for me a different kind of material that I could use, but then it was also the moment of ‘What is my taste? I don’t like this sound. I don’t love the sounds generated with pure electronic sounds, I don’t find it close to my taste’. I was always considering them as a musical material, of course, but if it fits better in your work that was a matter of choice. That was the reason that in the beginning, I mostly used recordings from the instruments. In a way, I found it sort of connected to the composition background that I had, so still I am using instrumental sounds but then

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I just cut them, splice them, and I work with them in exactly the same way that I want to. Recording on instruments—were they Iranian instruments? Mainly Iranian instruments, I don’t know why. Maybe because I had them at home. I also used piano recordings and other instruments, but I still tend to use Iranian recordings. I don’t know why. Maybe their textural elements you can relate to more? Yeah, that’s for sure. Whenever you were going through this trajectory, did you find the Western system to be a bit different? Was it like you may not relate to entirely? Or was the Western canon, the sound in Western classical music a bit alien to you? Do you still feel that? You mean Western music in general? I refer to the canonical approach to the Western musical world and also its sound. You said already that contemporary European classical, and also Baroque and Renaissance music, were more relatable to you. But in terms of knowledge structures, in terms of canonical impositions and in terms of the body of knowledge, you learned it through your studies—your master’s programme—and then further in the PhD. But this body of knowledge which is out there as a Western method—harmony, and counterpoint—do you find this is something alien to you? Or do you like to consider it as something that you embrace? I am not sure if I understand your question completely but I found it really interesting the way that harmony and counterpoint work and at the time that I was learning it, it was like magic for me. All you do is treat sound together and then you can play a chord. I was just sitting on the piano and playing this chord and it was like magic for me. How you combine separate sounds and create a new thing, which is the result of all. That was like a new thing but in a very positive and interesting way. Not that I am alien and it’s not related to me but it’s just like a discovery. You had an Iranian traditional sound system, tuning system and performing styles, which you grew up with. More than harmony, there was a microtonal intricacy. But I have to mention that Iranian music was not the only thing there; we had pop music, with all the musics out there and rock music. So it’s not like I heard a chord for the first time in classical music. It was all over the place in other types of music. But the

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moment when you yourself are making chords and playing them is different than just you hearing it. As you mentioned, in Iranian music the lines are really intricate and in a way, it is more like Baroque music—there are lots of ornaments. That’s maybe why I found classical music really plain in a way because in classical music there are no ornaments, it’s very minimal in terms of ideas it is very simple and really clear. Those ornaments I found were sort of a familiar element. I think in a way I am still using that in my electronic music, just these sort of intricate textures that put a lot of different sounds together to create this sort of intricate texture. BC: That is so apparent in your work, what I am exposed to. Now to more socio-political questions: as you know, Europe has a strong history of colonisation and cultural imperialism in many parts of the world which also reflected or resonated in Iran and in many parts of the Middle East. To give an example, Maqām: the way Maqām was interpreted in the Western world through the lenses of academics was reduced into 12; so there is an epistemological reduction through the colonial Western ears of interpreting the intricacies of Middle Eastern music. Given this context of the power relationship between Europe and the non-West, the colonial or imperial relationship Europe had with the other parts of the world, and being aware of this socio-political situation, how do you like to position yourself in the contemporary movement? Did you find there was pressure to embrace Western music? Or if there was no pressure, would you chose to work in the Western canon freely while at the same time being aware of the power structures? SA: You mean here? BC: Yes. Because you know Iran was never part of any colony but Lebanon was, Morocco was, Egypt was, India was, and many parts of the world were. But still this migration from the non-West to the West involves some sort of decolonial moment of responding to the Westernisation, Europeanisation, and of keeping your own identity. With the question of identity, did you feel pressured to compromise with your identity to embrace a new form, a new system of learning, understanding music or sound? SA: When I came to Europe, not only did I feel like I needed to adopt all those changes, but I also felt like my ideas which come from my country are very welcome here. People are very excited to listen to it and to hear about it. In that sense, I feel like maybe I need to go

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back and look at it more carefully and see what is there to pick and to lose. But also another thing is that slowly I am giving up on this identity idea and using it in music. It started, as I mentioned to you, really consciously picking something and then putting it together and making something. But the further it went I realised that if you as a composer are honest with yourself in composing music and it happens there, you don’t need to try for it. And if you try and it’s sort of a fake thing, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But I don’t think it’s a healthy way of approaching this. From that moment, I started to just not think about it and just do my own thing because we are all changing. I’ve been living here for eight years already. And I am definitely not the same person as eight years ago when I first came here, so I have a lot of influence, a lot of weather, a lot of humidity. We all change and I think as long as a composer is honest and does what he really thinks and feels, then identity—if it’s necessary—happens naturally. Otherwise, there is no point in forcing it just to keep my culture and identity alive and putting in an element in the music to make it happen. Having said that, a lot of people when they listen to my music, they immediately relate to the sort of Eastern. As I mentioned, the intention is not there anymore and I think it’s a much better way of working with this idea because I found it too limiting. All the time thinking about this and then about identity and then nowadays the idea of identity I find too limiting in general not only music. Because identity is really a complex thing; it’s not just about where you come from. That’s part of it, but there are lots of other elements involved like personal habits and personal influences in your life. All these make something that makes you unique so it doesn’t matter if you are from Iran or somewhere else all those other elements have a lot more influence on you. BC: I also think this way. But when it comes to historicising yourself, positioning yourself within the historical trajectory, a self-awareness or self-determination is necessary to find a place in the history of music and sound; sometimes it’s necessary to trace back to the origins—if there is an origin—or the different kinds of origins that we have, different kind of influences that are operating to help the process of what we are becoming. This awareness about the self is part of the self-discovery as well. When we think about an artist who grew up in a particular tradition, surviving another tradition,

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and embracing different kinds of influences at the same time, we have to be aware of that complexity rather than being naïve. Don’t you think that being an artistic researcher it is necessary to investigate and to figure out all the influences of becoming with a scientific approach? For example, it is often said that John Cage was influenced by Buddhist philosophy, but whom? When? How? If we think scientifically, we need to figure out the historical elements operating here. How did ‘4′33’ happen? It is said that Buddhist philosophy and Chinese I Ching influenced him but exactly when and in which moment and what are the different influences? This kind of investigation is helpful if we aim to rewrite a globally spanned history of sound practice. SA: Yeah, I agree that it is helpful but as a composer I found it limiting in a way or distracting for me. For me as a composer, as far as I have an idea about what I want to do with a piece of music, even if it’s very naïve, if that idea for me was very inspiring to make a piece of music, that’s enough for me as a composer. I just go with the composition further and I don’t really want to go into detail of knowing about the background and the ideas behind it because that is not my intention. First of all, it’s about composing new music, and as far as that part goes on that’s enough for me. Maybe that’s similar to being lazy also but if I continue to go into a systematic study, then I am a bit far from composing music. Or maybe it is possible to do both. For me, as long as it feeds my compositional ideas in an intuitive level, that’s enough for me. I don’t want to go deeper than what I need. That’s very relevant to do, but maybe in musicology you can do that. When I need it I go to those books and read about them, I don’t really feel that urge to do it myself. BC: Den Haag is such a milieu that it’s a tolerant place where cultural differences are often accepted and accommodated. People are curious about all forms of music because of Sonology. If we go to other parts of Europe, such as Nordic countries or Scandinavia, somebody who is coming from outside will naturally be exoticised more frequently compared to Den Haag. Here we are all surviving like everybody else. It’s not exoticising us. Exoticisation will happen when you are a marginal or alien entity. This identity politics of terming us as Iranian, Indian, or Mexican artists and composers is quite limiting in scope. But Den Haag is a kind of sanctuary. Den Haag should not be taken as a reference point, however. Perhaps, a

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reference point could be Europe, the European reference within which we are working. SA: Yeah, that’s true but I don’t have much experience in just presenting at other places. I just presented my music in Germany. I got a very interesting reaction to it. In France I presented. In general, I got a very interesting reaction because there is this idea is in Europe and in the Western world that a contemporary composer coming from Iran who composes electro-acoustic music, which is like a really modern thing in itself and Iran is seen as a traditional country: maybe they found it contradictory. BC: Kind of a stereotypical idea of what it should be. SA: Yeah and also we need to accept the fact that the knowledge about that area is very limited. So they don’t really know what it looks like to be in Iran. I have heard a lot of times that people went there for the first time and then they were just surprised, ‘Oh you have very nice infrastructure. Tehran is a huge city and everything’. It shows that they have different kinds of ideas about Iran. I don’t know why and what. So they are mainly surprised by how modern it actually is. In a sense, the place where I grew up—because I also grew up in a city—the same city that you might think of in other parts of Europe like big city, streets. Of course, in a very different context and everything, but in a way, it’s not that different. I was not in the middle of the desert and riding a camel. In a way there are differences but there are also a lot of similarities at the same time. We all grew up with American movies. So our understanding of the West is much better than Western people’s understanding of the East. What was the question? BC: The point was to play around with the question of identity and tradition. Identity forms in the beholder who is identifying you with something. Often we do identify ourselves with a body of knowledge. We both agree that we as non-Western practitioners of sound and music have an option to keep identifying with our origins or source or so-called traditions we are born with. At the same time, we can be open to many other forms of influences. My question is not about identification with an inflexible idea of tradition, but to figure out layers of influences. Within these different layers of influences, how is tradition taking some sort of a voice or does tradition at all have an agency? Whether this idea of tradition is

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something debatable. How is it compromised or incorporated or distorted or kept as a source or as a reserve? SA: I think for me it is always there as a source to use. I never felt that it’s something that doesn’t let me go further. I don’t let it be like that. For me, it is just a source of inspiration and material. It is sort of a type of sound; if I want to, I go to that tradition and I record from those instruments or those systems of working with sound. It’s one of the factors to me. I can use it or I can just skip it. You never know about the unconscious part, which is also another part of the story. BC: I look at three structural and aesthetic differences in terms of sonic confluence between traditions. We are all hybrid entities where different forms of influences are operating at the same time. But there are certain elements/certain parameters you can look at. Through my research, I am locating three particular parameters that I am curious about. One is time and temporality, the durationality of sound experience. Second is space and perspective, spatiality. The third is subjectivity, attention and improvisation. As we may agree that temporalities are different in different sonic or musical schools of thoughts. For example, the Western musical forms can be understood as predominantly a linear movement of time compared to more cyclical, ephemeral, fluid, more open-ended formations and a lot of shared temporality between the performer and the audience, or more orientation for community. When it comes to cultural encounters and differences, these parameters have a traditional conflict. How as a composer and sound practitioner, do you negotiate these different forms of durationality and, temporality given that you grew up with a particular sense of sonic time. When it comes to working within a European classical music context you encounter different forms of time, also space, spatialty-wise or subjectivity improvisation-wise. How do you negotiate? SA: I think it happens in the background for me. It is not something that I consciously deal with all the time. But, for instance, in terms of space, I started to compose multi-channel music here, I found it fascinating and I still keep doing this. But I don’t know where it came from in terms of tradition. I don’t know in which sense this sort of using space as a musical parameter can be related to tradition or Iranian music. Maybe it is in a way, but I cannot see the connection yet. That’s something that I found really intuitive and really

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important for me, something that I really work with and it helps me a lot. I understand your question but I don’t know how I am dealing with it. It’s not conscious, it is just happening. BC: When dealing with multi-channel audio in the strategies in which you spatialise sounds, you draw from a body of work that you were exposed to in your sonic development. Is it the electronic music or multi-channel electro-acoustic body of work in Europe that you draw from in terms of concepts and form? SA: In a sense the idea is Western and, of course, I learned a lot of things like how to use it from it. But the first moment that I realised that multi-channel is really for me to work with was when I was doing this research for my master’s about composing music based on carpet design. It was the last element of this identity influence and that was a step forward for me because that was the moment I didn’t want to take music anymore; I went to visual arts. So it was for me one step further that I didn’t want to deal with Iranian music or Iranian music elements anymore consciously. I said okay, carpet is a very interesting phenomenon, if I want to give one example from Iranian culture I think carpet is the best. Because if you go all over the world you will see Persian carpets everywhere. For me, that’s the main cultural identity of the Iranians—Persian carpets rather than anything else as a sort of symbol of the culture. It has a lot of elements inside it; carpets have this idea of the Persian garden and then the garden becomes a sort of ideal world that is separated from the outside world and there are a lot of these poetic layers in it which I found really interesting. So it’s not about the carpet itself but there are a lot of associations. Then I started to work on this idea of how I can compose based on carpet characteristics. One of the things that I realised was this symmetric aspect of the carpet, which is very strong. I was then thinking about how I can implement this idea of symmetry in music. That was the moment that I found spatial music a great tool for me to use in my music. Then I started to develop this idea of symmetric space in music. By that I mean to distribute musical material in a symmetric way in space. For instance, if I have eight-channel music then I use four groups of loudspeakers like two crosses; that was the first piece I composed based on this idea. And I distributed the musical material in a symmetric way (like the cross is symmetric) by not exactly copying the material on the other side but using similar material.

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And then I tried to develop this by putting more layers exactly at the same rate as in a carpet that you would see. You have multiple layers of a network of design put together. I went further with this idea and I found that it was really working for me, for the ideas that I wanted to present. It was taking the music from this narrative type of character which is talking about something towards more spatial and textural ways. This physicality of sound became really important for me. That is also another reason that I started to think about sound in terms of space. For me, a piece of music happens in the space in the concert hall. That’s why I don’t like making stereo versions of my pieces and putting them on the internet because that’s not the same experience. I really think about this sort of physicality and spatiality in my music. BC: This is very important because I was already wondering about your approach to object specificity or object-oriented ontology of sound in your compositional practice. The Western idea of sound art, generally speaking, is inclined towards an object-oriented ontology in sound, following specific chords, and the textural element is the object that one performer needs to follow. Whereas Indian or Middle Eastern music in general have an intersubjective element where the performer and the audience are in a reciprocal relationship—without the presence of the audience/of the listener, the performance will not take place. It’s like responding continuously to the expectation of the listener. But in Western sonic thinking, most often the position of the listener is not important. The importance is on the score, the object to follow. As you’ve said you don’t keep any stereophonic score of your work, are you inclined towards a sense of ephemerality, the performativity, the improvisational element of your composition in the foreground? SA: Yeah. That is the subject that I am working on for my PhD. For me, this ephemerality is very important. The moment that the music happens and materialises in space, it is the music for me. That is why I really strongly believe that fixed media music should be performed and it is not only about putting it on speakers but creating the space for the music, the atmosphere and the mode and everything and all the elements that are very important. That is when the music happens, otherwise there is no music. I cannot just send files and this is the music.

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BC: A score of a typical Western classical music performance is a coded object that needs to be followed. SA: In electro-acoustic music, we don’t have such a thing as a score. That this idea of music is there at the moment of the concert is very important for me. I am always composing this way. When I compose music I think about the moment of the concert actually. BC: Do you think about the listener? SA: Yeah. When I’m composing, I feel myself most of the time in the concert hall that I am going to present; so I am just imagining myself sitting there with other people listening to the music and I say, ‘okay this is good, this is too long’, and I try to imagine that situation when I am composing music. So in a way, it happens in the context for me. BC: When you described about drawing the idea from the Persian carpet, I was also thinking about the mosques—on the top, on the ceiling, there are many decorations. Those decorations are symmetrical too. SA: This symmetry is just everywhere in architecture, in all the other types of building, in all the decorative things you see in Iran. It is not especially for the carpets but a good representation of that is in carpets. BC: How do you describe this moment of performance? Is it an emergent moment? Or is it a moment that is designed from your side or you are open for anything to happen? Something like an explosion of sound through the different levels of participation, participation of the place, participation of the architecture, participation of the audience as the listeners. How do you approach your sound performance? SA: On one hand, this music is fixed. In terms of tempo, in terms of a lot of things, it is fixed. It’s not like I can play slower or faster, that is not possible. I can’t play softer and louder. There are also a lot of times when I experience my own music very differently each time in concerts. In a way, I also feel myself as an audience. That I will be surprised I will be like, ‘oh this is too long’, or ‘this is too short’, and I listen to it in a different way as if this is not a piece that I know. I really look forward to that moment to put this music for the audience and it can change a lot in terms of the outcome. Not only in terms of the acoustics of the hall, which is apparent, but also in terms of the model which is the result of everything that happens

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to create a quality that you produce by putting that music in that moment in that space. BC: But this is the problem with fixed media, that it’s not improvisational enough. Since you already have a design, you have all the tracks ready for the performance. How do you then improvise? The improvisational element is so crucial for an artist or composer whose listening developed in a certain way. SA: That is a strong part of traditional Iranian music and other traditions, of course. BC: For example, playing Oud or Tanpura in the presence of a listener, you respond to the expectations of the listener. In fixed media, even in multi-channel, how do you keep this improvisational spirit awake? SA: Not really, I guess. I control the volumes and that is very important for me; even the really tiny nuances that can happen, it is very important for me. Sometimes I feel like at this moment the music should be louder and I play a lot with these nuances of the dynamics in presenting. But other than that the nature of the fixed media music doesn’t allow you to improvise really. I do improvise during the composition, which is not something in relation to the audience, of course. I think I do a lot of this sort of improvisational practice during the composition of the music but not much in the connection to the audience at that moment. But I thought a lot about this idea of trying to make the fixed media music not absolutely fixed. By that, I mean having some elements open that I can decide at the concert time. But on the other hand, I found that when I am performing music I am not in a proper mode to do that. For instance, when I compose music I listen to each part. That’s also my character because I played instruments a lot during my musical career but I never found it something for me to be a performer and be on the stage and perform the moment. That was always too much for me—to be at the moment, and I had not that great of an experience of performing music in public. I always found being a composer really relieving in a way that you are on your own and you can decide in your own private moment to see how you want things to be in a certain way. After there is a sort of comfort with that, you can present it to the outside world; maybe that is a sort of a more personal thing than cultural. BC: What do you think of entertainment? Music is for engagement, music is mausiki. The idea was to engage the listener on different

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levels—on an intellectual level, for example. How do you think of entertainment and using sound as a tool to entertain in a performative way? You said that you imagine yourself at first as a listener of your work. Do you like to entertain yourself first? Or what is the idea of entertainment? SA: First of all, I don’t really look at music as entertainment, maybe that is because of the terminology in English. When I translate in Persian then the equivalent doesn’t have the same connotation as in English because in Western mode entertainment can be high art. Maybe when I translate to Persian then it’s not that high anymore. That is why I try to avoid this term. But in general, I look at art or music as more than entertainment. I can understand the function of entertainment also but I don’t really look at it in that way; for me, it is just this moment of special experience that you want to share with others. BC: Transcendental experience. SA: Yeah, rather than thinking in terms of entertainment. BC: Entertainment is more oriented towards indulgence or fun. SA: Yeah. I can appreciate it if someone does that but I don’t have the ability to do that. But I can appreciate the people who really have the ability to entertain with music in a proper way. BC: What are the projects that you are working on at this moment? Your future projects or current works that you are developing? Do give an outline. SA: I am just working on—in compositional terms—picking some older ideas that I am still experimenting with within this symmetrical space that I mentioned. This is always part of the compositions that I am still doing. I found it really interesting and I never saw someone else using this so far. I am experimenting with it and I am getting interesting results so I keep using it. Of course, there comes a moment where I am tired of it, but still, that element is present and still I am thinking about multi-channel music from the beginning as I start to compose. This sort of speciality is an integral part of composing music for me. I am having some ideas such as using video in my works but it’s just a sort of curiosity, when you want to do something new. I don’t know how it will go but these are just the plans that I have. I have a plan to work with dancers. That’s something that I want to experiment with. A lot of different projects but I cannot just give a certain direction like I am going this

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way or that way, just more like exploring different things. But I am still working on spatial music and I want to start writing for instruments and I always wanted to do that again but I always found it difficult. I always try to find new ways of dealing with it. Instrumental music is like writing scores again—even though I find it really difficult now after composing electro-acoustic music and just having this comfort with dealing with sounds and just putting sound together, doing all sorts of things and suddenly dealing with a piece of paper and score and writing and checking with instrumentalists. I really started to appreciate this layer of performers’ interpretation—that someone else takes your piece and makes something out of it. Even though it is very challenging, this interpretation, even though I believe there is interpretation in electro-­acoustic music and mixed medium music, that’s a different type of interpretation than someone else who just plays an instrument and the score. BC: Would you work with generative systems? In generative systems, improvisation is embedded into the process by not only giving the machine an agency but also to have moments of openness in the performance’s development. Are you interested in generative sound works? SA: I didn’t really think about it. I saw a lot of examples of the works that people did that were more interesting than the others but the idea didn’t attract me much so far. Maybe at some point it will. BC: As opposed to the human, a machine agency. SA: I use algorithms a lot but to help me make some decisions. I find those decisions really arbitrary in a way. It could be this and that, but I can just give it to an algorithm to give me some options and then I look at it and I pick from these possibilities; on that level, but not in terms of generative systems. BC: I think we have almost come to the end. Would you like to say something in this discourse that we had or something to add from your perspective? Maybe some comments or some questions or doubts? SA: No, not really. I think we have talked about everything.

CHAPTER 21

Debashis Sinha

Driven by a deep commitment to the primacy of sound in creative expression, Debashis Sinha has realised projects in radiophonic art, electro-­ acoustic music, sound art, audiovisual performance, theatre, dance and music across Canada and internationally. Selected sound design and composition credits include productions with Soulpepper, The Stratford Festival, Why Not Theatre, Project Humanity, choreographer Doug Varone, The Theatre Centre, Nightwood Theatre,  Young People’s Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, inDance, Tribal Crackling Wind, Volcano Theatre and Necessary Angel. Moreover, he is the recipient of multiple Dora Awards for his work. His live sound practice on the concert stage has led to appearances at MUTEK, the Guelph Jazz Festival, the Banff Centre, The Sound Symposium, ISEA, Madrid Abierto and other venues, and he continues to perform and release music under the moniker Upanishads. Sinha’s ancestral house is in Kolkata, India, but he resides in Canada. With Debashis Sinha, I personally have had exchanges since the MySpace days in 2007–2008—we were both part of the same networks. After the demise of MySpace, we got connected again via SoundCloud, and later through other social media platforms. We have followed each other’s works over these years, and kept in touch. Recently, I invited Sinha to contribute to the Anthology of

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Debashis Sinha—DS © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_21

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Exploratory Music from India (2021) album,1 which I curated. The following is an email conversation with him. BC: How did you come to work with sound art and experimental music? Please provide a personal background. DS: When I was five, I saw a drummer on a children’s program on television and immediately went to my mother to ask for lessons. She made me wait until I was six (no doubt in hopes I would forget) and I took a couple of years of lessons from very grumpy teachers. I stopped going to formal classes but kept playing drums. Since I didn’t have a drum kit, I used various surfaces and items, and maybe that started piquing my interest in unconventional sounds. In my teens, I got my hands on four-track cassette recorders and bad microphones and started making radio plays for myself, trying out weird ideas and techniques of recording and constructing sound. This has continued to this day I suppose. I was always interested in ‘outside’ music. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was because I felt somewhat like an outsider, myself. The Indian community in the town I grew up in was very, very small when I was a child. I knew every brown person in the city (this is not an exaggeration). My friends at school were very understanding as I looked back on it— ‘hey, Deb, want to come downtown and hang out?’ ‘No, I have to go to the Temple’. ‘Oh, okay’—but I did have two parallel lives and maybe one of the results of this was that I became interested in the music that I couldn’t see or hear—the punk and two-tone movements of the UK, free jazz, etc. There were very few outlets to find this music in my small city, particularly then in the early 80s, but I did. This interest still drives me to look for sounds and ideas that are not present on the surface. BC: What were the specific triggers for your interest in working with sound? DS: I would say the development of home recording technology principally tape decks and portable Walkman-type cassette recorders kept my interest in sound alive in my early years. Later, as I began to try to make a living in music in Toronto, I slowly began to realise that 1  More information on the compilation can be found on the label’s BandCamp page: https://unexplainedsoundsgroup.bandcamp.com/album/anthology-of-exploratorymusic-from-india.

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I could work with sound in a way that was intuitive and outside of the rules of composition, although this realisation was hard won. I felt acutely my lack of training—I played music for a living but never went to school for it beyond middle school, although I spent time with master drummers and musicians to learn—and that lack of training hobbled my acceptance of my own work and what I was doing with those tools. The development of technology allowed me to realise my ideas without the use of staff notation/Western music, but it was some time before I placed value on those expressions. I kept working anyway, though. To stop exploring wasn’t even a question. I had also—and I honestly I have no clue why—been collecting recordings (I didn’t even know they would be called ‘field recordings’) from my travels, mostly in Kolkata, India, where I have lots of family, but also on travels through Japan and Indonesia. There was something about the sound of those particular kinds of environments that felt part of me despite being so different from Western urban soundscapes. I had a desire to collect and listen to them, even before I knew what ‘sound art’ was. Upon arriving in Toronto and starting to play music, I started to meet people who knew about contemporary (‘new’) music as well as being interested in ‘world’ music (a horrible term that deserves to die an ignominious and celebrated death). I slowly started to expand my sound world outside of punk rock, traditional musics of various cultures, angular pop and jazz, but somehow sound art and radiophonic music didn’t make themselves known to me in my explorations—I was hanging out with too many ‘musicians’. Bear in mind the internet was very, very young at this stage, so while information was slightly easier to come by, most of it came through cassette tapes and the like. I slowly accumulated some skills and equipment and, in a hot summer where I had not much work, I finally tackled those field recordings, making my first CD, Quell.2 The process of making this CD brought to the fore many of the ideas I was interested in musically, but also it was the first time I really put into practice a concentrated, contemplative mode of creating and listening, something I had been looking to do but which the live music context (my career at this time was mostly concerts with bands at folk festivals and similar venues) did not 2

 Listen: https://debsinha.bandcamp.com/album/quell.

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invite. Looking back, I think the experiences of that long hot summer and the making of this CD was the start of the path of working with sound outside of the context of music. I sent that CD to New Adventures in Sound Art,3 a sound art organisation that is active in Ontario (they were based out of Toronto at the time). I’m not even sure how I came upon them, now that I think of it. Upon receiving Quell, they contacted me very enthusiastic, basically asking who I was—they’ve been a big part of the sound and radio art community in Canada and internationally for many years, and I think they were surprised at the work I submitted to them and that they hadn’t heard of me before. They’ve been a huge part of my explorations and have supported me very significantly over the years, particularly those early years when sound artists of colour were thin on the ground in Canada. They guided and nurtured my compositional voice in very constructive and concrete ways, helping me understand the conventions and techniques that were part of the sound art world at that time, and instilling confidence in me to make work that branched out of the conventional song and fixed-media playback format, such as constructed sound walks, and telephone audio installations where a listener could dial in to choose to listen to audio pieces. It was during this nascent time when so many disparate threads came together—technology, the internet, the mentoring of Darren Copeland and Nadene Theriault-Copeland at NAISA and discovering the history of the practice of sound art in Canada—that I began to accept my explorations and interest in sound outside of music as a serious part of my creative voice (even though for me sound and music was and remains very strongly intertwined). BC: Who are the inspirations for your work with sound? Anyone from India in the early years? DS: My continued interest in working with sound comes from an imperative of mindfulness and focus, of contemplation and an urge to delve into the moment. This is the impulse that I work with and also seek to continually uncover. It feels like a kind of digging down, an almost physical state of repose and balance that I seek when I’m working. This, of course, has resonances with the philosophies and spiritual/creative practices from the Indian subcontinent and in particular my connection to it as a young South Asian 3

 See: https://naisa.ca/.

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in the middle of Canada. I understood quite quickly that my work in sound was an avenue to express my personal experience but also my experience as a person of colour—to invoke voices and spaces that were not available to share on the concert stages I had access to at that time as a musician. Through working with sound and the material that spoke to me, I was building a sound catalogue of my own internal experiences that eventually I would be able to share a catalogue that was a kind of historical document of my experience as a first-generation Canadian. Apart from this, a very strong impulse in my work is storytelling—telling the stories that are hidden (like re-imagining gods from the Hindu pantheon4 as characters in a play, telling the ‘off stage’ stories that don’t make it into the mythology) or the stories of science and matter.5 I can trace this interest in storytelling to the work I’ve been doing with amazing theatre artists here in Canada and elsewhere (a large part of my practice is sound design and composition for theatre) and more fundamentally to the large role storytelling played in my life through my mother and grandparents in India—it was through stories that I learned about my culture and felt connection to it. So, bearing that in mind and based on my history as a musician, the foundations of my explorations in sound (apart from the storytellers in my family and my Bengali culture in general) were influenced by the idea-based compositions of Western new music composers like John Cage, Alvin Lucier and James Tenney (more recently people like Sarah Hennies and Christine Sun Kim), the contemplative minimal music of composers like Ann Southam and, of course, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. Also of great influence to me is the free music scene; people like Le Quan Ninh and Thomas Lehn, as well as the vibrant and world class free music scene here in Toronto. Of course, I am and have always been very excited by people taking their culture and traditions and turning them on their head to make fierce and personal music, like Tanya Tagaq and Dakha Brakha. There was an amazing jazz ensemble here in Toronto called Tasa, led by a very accomplished table player Ravi Naimpally, which was 4  Listen to the radio work Kailash by Sinha on this link: https://soundcloud.com/debsinha/kailash. 5  Listen to the referred radio work by Sinha on this link: https://soundcloud.com/debsinha/the-end-of-the-light?in=debsinha/sets/works-for-radio.

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a beautiful melding of the worlds of jazz and Hindustani music, very Shakti-like but with (probably) fewer notes. I feel very inspired also by visual art—too many people to list here, but Raqs Media Collective6 and the work of Christof Migone7 have been a huge influence besides poetry, speculative fiction and architecture. I think there is a confluence of disciplines that is starting to be enacted that I find very exciting. Urban planners and theatre artists, architects and sound artists, scientists and filmmakers are finding connections and intersections that are tremendously challenging—organisations like Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today8 and Theatrum Mundi9 are realising this cross-­disciplinary work on a very high level. Regarding India itself, as a concept, it is part of my explorations, of course. I am inspired by tradition (as I mentioned earlier), and as a percussionist have studied some rhythmic theory of Hindustani and Carnatic musical traditional music, but to me, I feel like that the work I do is a kind of filling form with content—the form of contemplative, disciplined, spontaneous expression with the content of my experience with my tools and instruments. To be honest, for a long time, I felt as if I was not contributing to my culture, as I knew I would never devote my life to one instrument. But then I began to frame my practice as an expression of my search for meaning as a south Asian Canadian, and that that search and expression are, at heart, part of my own cultural expression and, by extension, a part of what it means to be influenced by India. BC: How is the broader idea of a sound culture in India (if we can term it that way) different from the European/Western canons of sound practice and thinking, in your opinion? DS: The term ‘sound culture in India’ is one that makes me pause. A subcontinent full of cultures, languages, food, music and myths is by no means homogenous, and my understanding and acceptance of the term (and I do accept it) speaks more to the borders of my own understanding and experience than it does to any reality that exists. There is an instinctual understanding I think of what we  See: https://www.raqsmediacollective.net/.  See: https://christofmigone.com/. 8  See: http://www.tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com. 9  See: https://theatrum-mundi.org/. 6

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mean by ‘sound culture in India’ that presupposes a type of parsing (for me) that is rooted in class and alienation. It’s a phrase that speaks to my own limited perspective, yes, but more than that, it is one that maybe encapsulates my efforts to understand myself and the limits of those efforts. I will never be, nor fully understand and internalise what India is (indeed, no one can), so all I can do is accept that my limited experience and knowledge is a small piece of what ‘sound culture in India’ truly is. It suffices, but I understand and grapple with the phrase’s limitations. That being said, I do, somehow, understand what you mean when you use that phrase! So I’ll share here my own perspective and experience as a first-­ generation Bengali Canadian. My main exposure to sound culture in India is partly through music, but mostly it is through the experience of listening to urban environments. I collect a lot of field recordings, have done so for many years (see above) and those recordings (and in particular, the act of collecting them) are part of an expression of a part of myself that, before I understood it, was nascent and sleeping in the West. I’ve always loved cities and I’m sure it is because of my experience of Kolkata specifically when I was a child and pre-teen. We spent time there when I was very young, and wandering around the streets and riding the rickety streetcars alone as a 12-year-old in the afternoons (when most people slept) was a magical time. I think I was able to become myself, unmediated by family and cultural relations and rules. Bear in mind this was in the early 80s, well before the globalised world we live in today—I knew I was different on the streets of Kolkata, but it was a different that was different from the difference I felt in Canada. So because of this, I think I fell in love with cities, and learned to listen to them as a part of myself. Cairo, Tokyo, New York, Toronto, Jakarta—there was something in the sound profile of these spaces that spoke to and energised me. And I can directly trace that back to riding the streetcar that ran alongside the tracks outside Kalighat Metro, riding them to the terminal at Esplanade. There is, as you know well, a very integrated, noisy, intersectional everyday sound world in India that I latch onto (or maybe latches onto me)—when I think of the ‘sound culture of India’, I think of this. One can hear everyone, everything, all the time and very loudly. It is a sound culture that accepts that others exist and allow them to take up aural space, the polar opposite of what sound culture is here in

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Canada (and the West in general, with some exceptions, of course). This acceptance of the sound world as being something beyond our control, as something we need to co-exist with, is very different than what I know here, where noise bylaws are in effect and neighbourly censure accompanies any sort of loud expression. BC: What do you think of as ‘canons’ of sound thinking and aesthetic practice with sound in the Indian context? What are the traditional sounds in your opinion? DS: This relates to my answer earlier, but of course this is only based on my very limited experience of India and its outsized influence on my internal picture of what it is to me. India is a largely rural country, but I have very little direct experience of these environments. When I think about your question, I’m confronted mostly with the action of my own listening practice in India. To me, it’s not that there is a set of traditional sounds (although of course there certainly are), but rather it’s that I enact a particular kind of listening when I encounter sounds stemming from the subcontinent, be they field recordings or constructed sonic artworks. Of course, there are sounds that one only finds in India, but it’s not so much for me the content as it is the action of listening that defines the canon—it is a confluence of modes of listening/action rather than content. I simply do not listen in the same way in the West, and when I listen in that way here (I’m writing this in my home in Toronto), I relate this action specifically to my cultural heritage. BC: Do you locate certain tendencies in your own work that draw on ideas from the Indian canon of sonic thinking or traditional sound cultures in India? Are there any? DS: When I create sonic artworks or music, I am very specifically trying to engage in a practice of listening and composing that draws deeply on the aspects of my heritage that I feel are important or are missing in my day-to-day Western life. I am at all times, regardless of the concept or content of the work, trying to elicit an attention from the listener and myself that is very heavily grounded in my expression of my cultural heritage. This attention I speak of draws on many layers of my own experience and the space-time of the listening context—I have in mind a picture of a body in stillness and attention, breath slowed, brain function razor sharp and focused, ears open, allowing the periphery of our attention to be accepted

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and integrated into the act of listening. There is a very specific physical state that I try to elicit in working with sound; it is difficult to articulate the specifics but I’ve felt that state before in meditation and in the playing of music. The closest analogy to this state I can find is codified well in the philosophical and spiritual teachings that originate in India, and this connection is very important to me. It is a direct relationship that drives much of what I do with sound. BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of time (duration, temporality) in your work? DS: The influence of attentive and meditative listening on the experience of time has been extensively documented, but I’m more interested in replicating or being inspired by my own experience of time when I enact that type of listening. One work I’ve done is called ‘The (X) Music Conference’, wherein I improvised live from 07:00 PM to 07:00 AM alone, in an effort to replicate the experience of the Dover Lane Music Conference—an all day/night classical music festival in Kolkata that I have had the good fortune to attend multiple times. I also made a two-channel video installation (with other sculptural elements) entitled ‘he sat on the glittering precipice’, where I created video loops constructed from photos I took every hour over 24 hours in my father’s room when he was bedridden and palliative at home. Aspects of video playback were influenced by Wolfe Tone10 in a 24-hour audio recording of that room11 during that same period (although the only sound in the installation itself was the air pump on a hospital bed in the gallery space). As a percussionist, I have a very complicated and rich relationship with time, influenced by my studies in various musical traditions and the use of extended techniques on my percussion instruments, which create textures and grids that are irregular but nonetheless imposed on the passage of time. Rhythm was something I for some reason resisted as I started my explorations in ‘serious’ sound art (I’m still not sure why) but rhythmic impulse and gesture have found its way back into my work, particularly as it relates to  See: http://stringsmagazine.com/how-to-tame-annoying-howling-wolf-tones/.  The 24-hour recording was edited such that each hour was on one track of a one hour-­ long 24-track session. The resulting mix was stretched to 24 hours long, and the wolf tones of this 24 hour long recording were used to alter video parameters, the video consisting of each photo scanned (10  ×  10 pixels), from top left to bottom right, over the period of 1 hour × 24 photos. 10 11

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­ reathing and time, the optimal moment of a gesture. Developing b the sense of ‘the optimal moment’ has roots in my experience in free music and theatre. Time and timing are integral parts of good storytelling. How do you conceptualise the idea of space (aural perspective, depth of field) in your work? One thing I’ve learned in working in theatrical spaces over the last two decades or so is the power of sound to create a listening architecture that hangs on the piece and that, because of sound’s ephemerality, can be nimble and flexible. Sound actualises physical (and the listening) space, and can alter it powerfully. It is rare that I don’t exploit the physicality of sound in a work, and that gesture stems directly from my experience in sound design and creating/ deploying content in theatres across the country over systems that sometimes have many tens of outputs. It’s not only the physical space around the audience that is at play, but using sound to alter and support/confound the focus of the storytelling space and audience attention. Those lessons and strategies translate well to the smaller stereo and 5.1 spaces of my sound works. How do you conceptualise the idea of improvisation in your work? Improvisation’s intense association with Indian music looms large in my mind. Its use as a compositional tool and a conceptual gesture in my work is powerful. It’s most often that my improvisations are executions of an idea behind a moment in my compositions— that the improvisations in my works are more of a conceptual texture that I’m trying to evoke, and specifically the gesture of improvisation (regardless of content) is often an effort to connect to the association with mindfulness and the culture of India. Improvisation also serves a more prosaic impulse—that of generating content to be manipulated and edited after the fact. It’s very often that I know the sound constellation that I want to explore, and use multi-tracked improvisations to realise it. In working with the recordings, I uncover the particular composition I only intuited. I have no other tools—as I mentioned, I have no specific compositional or musical training—and more often than not I cannot replicate the final composition, and it only lives in the recorded realm. How do you conceptualise the idea of attention in your work? I’ve spoken a lot about attention earlier. It’s definitely a core tenet of all the aspects of music and sound making that I undertake.

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Attention is related to absolutely everything I do with sound, and on good days, with the way I live my life. BC: Do you work with microtonality and Shruti found in Indian classical music? How do you like to relate to these sonic, ritual, traditional and customary aspects of Indian sound practices and aesthetics on a broader cultural level, and how do you innovate on your own terms? DS: I don’t specifically work with microtonality as understood in a codified and Western sense. Tuning, harmony, consonance and dissonance are present in my work, and pitch relations are attended to, but very often the sound material I work with is not particularly tuned (e.g. field recordings)—not always, but often. It very much depends on the work and the sound material I am working with. Raga and melody are used, of course, but since I’m not cognisant of harmonic rules, these gestures are intuitive and driven by emotion and idea. I think you’re referring to pitch and tonality when you speak of ritual in your question earlier, but ‘ritual’ and ‘customary’ immediately bring to mind physical, bodily gesture rather than sound codification and deployment. The meditative and mindful action of being in one’s body is something I allude to in regard to your earlier question on certain tendencies in my work—that there is a specific, physical state I picture in my mind when I think of making work. This physical state can be thought of as an expression of the master musician’s ecstatic embodiment of the musical performance, and it is related to it, but it is not the principal impulse in my looking for it through my work. I don’t know if innovate is the word I would use, but I sense what you’re asking. I cannot help but innovate simply due to the context of my life in Canada and my dis/connection to India, my in/between-ness. I now see it as an empowerment, that I must seek and express connections not immediately apparent or available. And I do it on my own terms because I—and only I—am me. BC: The idea of ‘sound art’ departs from a typical Western musical tradition where tonal structures are discreet and quantifiable; how do you interpret the Indian system of microtonality that is ‘immeasurable’ and in which the ‘unknowable’ is hidden between microtones? Do these ideas and other Indian sonic aspects reflect in your work? DS: I’ve never accepted the prevailing foundational imperative that pitch and tonal structures are discrete and quantifiable—I’ve spent

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too much time exploring and studying non-Western musical traditions to accept that as a premise, even though I know the premise exists and I have good friends who are brilliant who accept it. It’s been a long road but my journey has always assumed sound and music are very intertwined. I am perfectly happy to reach for an instrument as I am to my computer mouse to support an idea. I’ve never really understood the hard lines that some impose between the disciplines. I’m currently reading a transcript of a colloquium on sound art and music,12 which is very interesting—people trying to understand and build a system for communication between the forms. I am not sure I approach sound explicitly keeping in mind the Indian system of microtonality although, of course, it has resonances (ha) with that system given the perspective I hold through my explorations and held culture. I do invoke the idea in my work when appropriate as a guiding principle, but in general, I don’t often pay attention to harmony / pitch / microtones overtly. Rather, I’m more interested in working with aural texture, emotionality, structure and listening. The hidden and unknowable is present in the sound material I work with, as a concept that I hope to (sometimes) evoke and also in the actual sound material. Digital tools (and their limitations) allow us to expose qualities of recorded sound not immediately apparent, and that information often comes in useful in my work. There’s something quite alluring about noise and error, I find, and I often use tools to give the impression of degraded audio. Machine learning tools (this is a whole other conversation) are something I’m exploring explicitly in my work as it is a useful analogy, a kind of enactment of the human limitations of understanding hidden realms, and this appeals to me on a storytelling level. Using and warping sound is, to put it simply, fun, and I think those experiments yield useful material and illustrate concepts I don’t always start out with when I start them. BC: When you use electronics or recording technology, how do you like to replace the deeply embedded, communal, anthropogenic, improvisatory, ephemeral and (inter-)subjective ideas of performing arts embedded in Indian thoughts?

12  Gardner, Thomas and Voegelin, Salomé (2012), Colloquium: Sound Art and Music. London: Zero Books.

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DS:

I don’t know if I’ve ever given thought to replacing anything really, when working with sound. My work with sound (which I should point out often, but not always touches on my cultural heritage) really comes from a point of curiosity about what sound can do to the listener, and the stories it can tell, and how it can tell them. Identity plays a large part in those explorations, and culture and story, but I don’t really consider my sound pieces as touching on or commenting on performative paradigms, even when I do perform my works. BC: Do you think there is a confluence of cultures, between East and West, and between Global North and Global South in your work? How do you identify yourself? DS: I think it is quite clear that there is a confluence in my work, simply because of who I am and what operates in my creative (and day-to-­ day) life. I cannot help but be influenced by my experiences as a Canadian of Indian descent, and I cannot help but see the reality of my culture through a lens that separates me from it. At the same time, it feels deeply part of me in a real way. This in/betweenness I reference earlier is becoming more and more expressed in North America, simply because of the history of Indian immigration and where we are as a group—first-generation Canadians of Indian descent are now in their 40s and 50s, and taking on and making work that is typical to that stage of life. My experience and expression of this confluence is heavily influenced by history, the point in time in Canada (and more explicitly Toronto) when I began to explore these things—the development of music and cross-cultural influence and the way it was enacted in Toronto; the rising willingness of people of colour and their allies to investigate and dismantle white supremacy; the development of technology and the (as yet incomplete) democratisation of music-making tools; and the cohort in which I grew up, filled with first generation Canadians from various cultures, all trying to make sense and space for their experiences. If there is a confluence in my work, it is more as a response to this rather than my own, solitary experience of trying to make sense of what it meant to be Bengali in the West. I’m not particularly interested in identifying myself, or quantifying my identity, although I accept that it can be important (and I have done so in various contexts when it seems important to). Given the fact that I inhabit a brown body in a Western culture, it is very apparent where

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I land on the continuum of identity, and there are assumptions on both sides of that point that I don’t subscribe to. I’m happy to inhabit that place on the continuum, and float in the middle of a complicated sphere of myth, habit and expression. BC: What is your comment on Western/European colonisation of India and its historical impact on sonic culture? How do you like to decolonise sounds in your work, if possible? DS: I think the fetishisation of India in sound art (and just in general) has been long and deep in the West. It can be very aggravating. I think there is a utopian mindset about so-called brown cultures (India in particular, which is seen in much the same way as Africa in the West) that have a long history here in Canada. In the sound art world, partly this is expressed by—and I accept that I’m by no means an authority on its history and ideas—the impact of the work of the World Soundscape Project. While bringing to the fore the importance of the impact of sound and listening in human environments, the WSP to me partly encapsulates a potentially problematic and narrowly Western view of what desirable and undesirable sound is, and how it operates. There is something about it that I can’t quite articulate, but it doesn’t sit well with me. The quantification of high (like nature) and low-fidelity (a busy city street) sound does feel like the thin end of the wedge, where an extreme view would be that only the middle of a remote forest is a viable and constructive soundscape, which to me smacks of paternalism (I accept am exaggerating outrageously here, but I think the point holds). There is something about the dismissal of low-fidelity environments that is exclusionary, take for instance the fact that noisy urban soundscape environments are mostly the domain of the poor and working-­ class and that while it may be desirable, the benefits of silence are available largely to the affluent with no real connection to the desire to dismantle those structures, except in some cases.13 The WSP approach does bring up excellent points about high-fidelity sound environments (ones where sounds have space to breathe, to put it one way) being difficult and frightening for the ‘human doing’ as opposed to the human being. One cannot deny the truth of this statement. On the other hand, I also reject the idea that there is no  For example, Hush City project: http://www.opensourcesoundscapes.org/hush-city/

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noise pollution and it’s all a matter of perspective; it’s something I need to articulate better and think further on in my own practice. Regarding colonisation: I feel there is still a permission to elevate particular sounds above others, and to value their impact and place more that is definitely narrow-minded and colonialist, and that can manifest as a fetishisation or rejection of soundscapes and, by extension, of cultures. In India, I think my explorations have been predicated on a desire to listen to urban spaces as they are—first in an effort to find my place in my cultural heritage, and then as an enactment of a mode of listening that is tied to my cultural expression. I think the practice of mindful listening can go a long way in de-­ colonising aural spaces and ultimately foster structural changes (within and without) that benefit all. There is a reckoning taking place now—as I respond to your questions, we are in our third month of the Coronavirus pandemic, well into many weeks of protest against police brutality and many years of the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m hopeful that these movements will give rise to a new awareness to how we approach soundscapes and sound art, one that is inclusive and respectful of our perspectives and lived experiences. Certainly I’ve seen the seeds for this already, and indeed, that change is inevitable. Hopefully it is a change that is constructive in its execution. BC: How do you engage with the audience? Do you like to entertain them? DS: My experience performing on stages has left an indelible imprint on me—the stage is a performance space, and the relationship to the audience is integral to my presence on it. I don’t think it is respectful to ignore that relationship—why would you be in a room with people that you then ignore? The sharing of energy through the artwork, the performance with each other is the entire point of performance. Art is experienced collectively. This does transmit to my work with fixed media, in a way. That sharing of energy is something I want to be alive in the place where the work is housed— online or in physical space. It isn’t the intent of the work, but certainly a component of it. Engagement for me is integrated into the desire to invite listening and the desire in me to create a particular physical embodiment of the listening act that I alluded to earlier. I am speaking, it should be said here, of my work that I consider ‘sound art’ which incorporates music but I don’t classify as music

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myself. When I create ‘music’ of course, I wish to entertain the audience, and there are particular outcomes I have in mind when I make or perform musical material—to make people move or dance, to entertain them in a club-like setting. Despite my many years’ experience on the concert stage, and my respect for the importance of the relationship between performer and audience, I do think my performance style could be described as understated—to me, respecting the performance is an action that is embodied through intense attention and mindfulness. If I can move through a performance with that, then I have executed a performance that is true, authentic, engaged and engaging. Engaging with the audience when I’m making more contemplative, sound art-type work is more about drawing the listener in a different way—something more akin to the physical manifestation of what listening is that I go into above. I’m still acutely aware that there is someone on the other side of the work, perceiving it. It’s a strange dichotomy: on one hand, in my compositional process I am following paths and solving puzzles that present themselves to me, but at some point that process is more or less done with and my focus shifts to making the work—and I am not sure what the word is, here—palatable? Exciting? Neither of those work, but in any case, at some point my focus shifts. But it is almost never that I don’t take into account the listener on the other side of the work. They are part of it. An artwork without a perceiver is just someone sitting in a room doing stuff. There is a moment in theatre that I love—it’s the moment in which we have the first rehearsal with sound (either in the rehearsal room or onstage). Playing that first sound cue for the acting company, with all of us present in the room is an electrifying moment. Even if I have been sharing sounds with the director or other designers, all of us in the room together collectively listening to the first sound played brings into focus so many disparate aspects of the play for everyone, and puts them all into one mindset. For me, I see the set and costumes; the world the actors move through on the stage is now built in my mind’s eye. So many questions and ideas that the company takes in faith become real in that moment; it is a moment of—think of it—just sound playing in some speakers. It’s valuable and beautiful, and that moment is something that always is present in my mind when I release a sound work into the wild.

CHAPTER 22

Mohamad Safa

This conversation unfolded in Mezyan, a buzzing and crowded restaurant and bar in Beirut, which I frequented with friends during my postdoc at American University in Beirut. We were sitting in the long balcony outside of the restaurant located in the busiest Hamra district. Safa was about to leave for London to join his studies at the Goldsmiths, University of London. We were sipping Arrak as we were discussing, with sounds of people murmuring around. The conversation carried resonances of our previous discussions elsewhere. BC:

The project ‘Connecting Resonances’ deals with, broadly speaking, the conceived and manifested non-Western perspectives in contemporary sound studies and sonic art practices, and explores the idea of intercultural confluence between artistic traditions focusing on sound practices. To begin with, I will ask you—how did you come to sound practice? MS: When I was ten years old my parents got me a guitar and told me that I was going to a conservatory. That’s it! I didn’t have a say. So I went and studied for five years and then dropped out because it was a very systematic and bit boring. Nothing interesting happens at the conservatory. Now I do regret it. I wish that I had stayed till Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Mohamad Safa—MS. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_22

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the end to know how exactly it functions. I started listening to Metal. I decided to stop classical guitar and got an electric guitar without the knowledge of my parents. I started playing basic Metal stuff, learning Metal. Then I had a Black Metal band and we released an album, the album was called Damaar. Then I released an album and label called Nuclear War Now1 which is now quite a prestigious Black Metal label. The guy who was recording for us— the sound engineer—had a home studio and we used to hang out at his place. He introduced me to software, pedals and machines. He told me to do stuff other than Metal with the guitar. At that time I was 18–19 years old. We started discovering ambient music with him. We discovered artists like Biosphere. The first thing was experimental music like Biosphere. And then I don’t know how, but in a weird way, we made a jump to noise; we discovered Merzbow, KK Null, Government Alpha and the Japanese scene at a really young age because I felt it was resonating a lot with Black Metal but it was more in an unrestricted way. You can do it in your house, you don’t need a band for it. We thought of it in a very basic way, like you could be in your house and experiment. So we had this kind of nice experimentation. The sound engineer used to give me a guitar and I used to plug it to a rack and just play. While I was playing, all these weird sounds were coming out and that was fascinating. So I decided to do that on my own. I started collecting pedals and playing guitar and experimental music but nothing was recorded until I discovered Irtijal,2 and Chaotic System, and their underground raves where you could only go with invitations. These were focused on hardcore techno, noise, and sometimes the hardcore party environment that was really nice. They had a really strong interest in music. They were really interested in introducing people to new styles of music. At that time Irtijal festival was in its early days. It was fascinating to go and see people that were using instruments in a way that I had never seen before. It was a big inspiration, both Irtijal and Chaotic. Then I was studying architecture and was mostly hanging out with a group of friends who were in film studies and filmmaking. They were asking me to compose scores for their films and then they started thinking about experi The label page: https://nuclearwarnowproductions.bandcamp.com/  Founded in 2001, Irtijal is the oldest experimental music festival of Beirut, Lebanon.

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menting more with sounds—how can you make scores, how can you compose? But I did not have any kind of proper exposure to film composition. But it started to become bigger for some time. Mainly it was these influences around me like Irtijal, to a certain extent, Chaotic and Osman Arabi,3 20.SV. He (Osman Arabi) was a noise artist based in Tripoli and we were good friends. I was listening to his records and then I met him and we became friends. Then I started thinking about how to deviate from the structural record-based music. I started to get more interested in performance. Five or six years ago, I had already an interesting portfolio in films. I did quite a lot of films, mainly underground films, student films etc. Then I decided to do my own stuff. Since I had been a good architect, how could I think about architecture sonically and how can I transform all the architectural stuff into sound, into textures, into ideas that can only be translated sonically. So I did this project, it was an eight-track album. Actually, it was supposed to be two albums. I did the first one which was composed four years ago but it was only released a year ago. And this year I’m finishing the sequel to this album. In parallel I had a few installations; I had commissions for people doing specific art projects who needed music or sounds for their artworks so I was starting to venture into that field. About two years ago I started doing my own art installations, which were mainly revolving around the research between sound and architecture. I started going into sonic violence, into noise as a physical and social phenomenon, and started researching in detail. Last year I was a fellow in Ashkal Alwan,4 working mainly on a project that was a research on noise. Now I am at the Goldsmiths, and I am working on post-impact reverb and its extension in the city as a form of extension of trauma. I am studying reverb sounds and its translation in brains: how the brain understands reverb at one point, and how the brain understands trauma as a sonic event. BC: Are you drawing on the urban experience of bombing in Lebanon and its sonic perception? 3  Osman Arabi is an experimental guitarist, music producer, and sound designer from Tripoli, Lebanon, currently residing in Berlin, Germany. 4  Ashkal Alwan—the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts is a non-profit organisation based in Beirut promoting contemporary arts practices and discourses.

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MS: Hundred per cent! To be honest, it was an influence from two people that I have been reading for some time now: J.  Martin Daughtry, who wrote a book Listening to War.5 He did a kind of ethnography or expedition on the sounds of war in Iraq after the American invasion and how it shaped specific forms of social structures. In this book, he coined different terms that create urban experiences out of warfare through sonic events. Sounds of bullets, sounds of bombardment, sound of vehicles: he calls it Belliphonic Sounds and then he starts going into the details. He talks about what the acoustic territories are in a wartime. At one point he starts talking about the use of sound in torture, about sonic traumatic events and reverberations and how it is implemented. And the other person is James E. K. Parker who is a legal scholar on sound. He works on Sonic Lawfare, on ideas on how we can look into sonic events on sonic attacks or violence from a juridical point of view, how to adjudicate specific acts of noise violence or sonic violence.6 These two readings along with other forms of reading that are related to post-colonial studies started to shape how I thought of Beirut as a sonic environment, how I thought of Lebanon also to a certain extent, but I focused on Beirut as a sonic environment. So I ended up making this timeline that was basically a timeline of all the sonic events starting from the Civil War as the end of the major sonic event or major kind of sonic disaster, and then going into small wars with Israel and all the acts of assassinations like car bombs, suicide bombs etc. And then I started looking into the areas in between. I am trying to argue that these in-betweens are the extensions of reverb after the explosives, which is a kind of decay. Physically the kinds of sounds that are enacting and recreating those reverbs are mainly the sounds of the cities. In particular, I am focusing on construction events because these same people that were involved in the Civil War were endorsing and also supporting the infrastructures of these new constructions. They started to confront each other not with war but with construction and real estate. So I started thinking about real estate as a kind of a vehicle, 5  Daughtry, J. Martin (2015). Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 6  Parker, James E.  K. (2019). “Sonic Lawfare: On the Jurisprudence of Weaponised Sound”. Sound Studies—An Interdisciplinary Journal 5 (1): 72–96

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an extension, or a tool that was extending the reverb of this impact. In the department we are in, we are dealing with forensics. We deal with evidence at the Research Architecture in Goldsmiths.7 And I am trying to look at new evidentiary methods to show that sound is a form of violence and the only tools that I managed to decipher so far were testimonies and brain scans. Brain scan is a form of direct translation of sound in your brain and how it impacts brain functions. I’m looking into auditory cortexes, structures of the Hippocampus and Amygdala in the brain. This translates space, emotions and how sound is connected to them. When sound is violence, how can we see it in the brain so that we can hold people accountable for it so that we can show evidence that this person or this group of people were subjected to specific sounds that can be considered as violence? But at the same time these kinds of structural violence, sonically, are grounded within a bigger structural violence scale in Lebanon since the Lebanese structure by itself is neo-colonialist to a certain extent. It extends to all kinds of colonial violence that was happening before the independence in a more subtle and targeted way that cannot be actually seen or perceived, and so no one, especially the international community had any idea about how to deal with this. This is what James E. K. Parker deals with. He argues that so far we have very underdeveloped methods to debate sound studies in violent instances. BC: You might be interested in a new publication by the University of Westminster Press. It is a series called ‘Laws and the Senses’ and one issue would be ‘Hear’.8 The last few issues that they have published are based on See and Taste and this latest issue would be on Hearing. This series will investigate senses through the lenses of law. And I was also thinking that reverb, time stretch, these sonic processes have a history of control and manipulation. For example, Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne are working on a new book titled Tuning Time: Sequences from the History of Time Stretching and Pitch Shifting.9 7  The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London: https://www. gold.ac.uk/architecture/. 8  Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (2020). “Howl Redux: On Noisific(a)tion”. In Mandic, M (ed.), Law and the Senses: Hear. London: University of Westminster Press (forthcoming). 9  Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne are co-writing a book entitled Tuning Time: Sequences from the History of Time Stretching and Pitch Shifting (forthcoming). They explore how blind

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MS: Okay. Okay, this is very interesting. I am really looking forward to this stuff because reverb studies is not underdeveloped but is still sort of under observation. There is always observation on reverb studies, like Emily Thompson’s work The Soundscape of Modernity10 and this collection of books on MIT Press; like Wallace C. Sabine on how he created this machine for calculating reverbs,11 what does that mean, what is the exact nature of the technology, how we can use this technology, how it shaped forms of architecture, forms of spaces. So in my work I’m looking at real estates because I’m arguing that to a certain extent real estate—the way it has become now in the form of the constructions—accentuates all reflections. So reverb had a different texture; instead of having open spaces, the late reflection would be really late—it won’t come to you faster. But in closed spaces, this is different. BC: Yes, closed spaces like corridors, underground, basements etc. Dehumanising space, or ‘Non-Places’, in the way Marc Auge terms it.12 It seems to me that you are influenced by architecture and its manifestation in spatial practice informing your sound practice. In other words, you come from a musical experimentation background, but at the same time, you are also interested about architecture of sound and its spatiality. How does this influence your artworks or installation works? MS: The works that I speak about today are mainly related to the idea of shelter construction and re-standardisation or changing the standards of architecture in order for it to become defensive or shelter-­ like and how this has impacted sound. So I work with metal and compose the piece, where I superimpose all the wave-forms on top of each other and create an impulse sound with it. And this impulse sound when it is hit on this piece of metal—which is basically a metal sheet on top of which there is a coil sheet—reverberates in readers, physicists, engineers, artists, musicians, speech researchers, and forensics experts sought ways to separate the time and frequency, and therefore the perceived duration and pitch, of reproduced sound. The book is at once a cultural, technological, and media-­ theoretical history of the phenomenon, from early experiments in the 1930s to today’s software such as Ableton Live. 10  Thompson, Emily (2004). The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 11  See: http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-RT60.htm. 12  Auge, Marc (2009). Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. New York: Verso.

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the room. It can imitate or it can actually speculate on how people would live inside shelters when a building is being bombarded. It is mainly about speculating on sensorial experiences that people might live through and at the same time looking at it from a legal standpoint where you’re not dying when buildings collapsing on top of you and you’re under it. This is a form of violence and there is a trauma. But at the same time in the laws of proportional warfare these things are always withdrawn to the background because this should be like what Eyal Weizman calls lesser of all evil: if we attack and kill ten militants, it’s okay if two civilians die in the process. So sonically I am looking at all the stuff that comes out later like the reverb, the slips, the sound that is leaked, or the experience that was traumatising but was not addressed on the surface. Sound is a witness to all these. It is a kind of vehicle that can actually deal with all those subjects. BC: Even unheard, oppressed voices, which are manipulated so that you cannot hear them. More specifically, do you think there is a canon in sound studies—a sound cannon or scholarly cannon in music practice, or broadly, a historical canon based on sonic practices in the Middle East? MS: Yeah. Some people do not think so but I think in the last few years it has been formed. I think musically more than sonically. Let’s say there are specific sounds per se in the Middle Eastern scene but they are not extremely defined. I am talking about sound in terms of physics, not in terms of sound as a metaphor of music. But in terms of dealing with music, composition and any type of effects that creates music, there is a common ground between film musicians in terms of how they create and how they deal with music so that it ends up creating the sound. But how I understand sound is entirely from its physical environment. I do not understand sound as strictly music. I understand sound as the sound art practice, as the city, and as the violence. In Lebanon, there is a very particular signature, which is different from other places, but musically we are starting to have similarities, which is interesting. Thanks to different musicians, people who were experimenting, who were trying to understand, or trying to think about stuff: when we were young, we were questioning why they were not happening and when we were growing older we started witnessing that people were doing it. Like the use of Arabic Maqāms, Arabic tempos or other Arabic

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influences: why weren’t they deployed or why weren’t they experimented with? But slowly we are seeing so many acts, like Tour de Dragon, or Jerusalem in My Heart.13 I heard collaborations between different musicians mainly in the Irtijal. They have been experimenting a lot with these kinds of sounds, and at the same time, there are these strong, harsh, over-amplified sounds. These are actually what shape the whole environment; it shapes the whole amplification, like the distortions, reverbs, delays, it’s like a whole collection or intensive collage of effects and multilayering of effects. I think that resembles how we are. And many musicians deal with this way of producing music. For me this is the start; I see it is as an observation which is yet to be articulated. BC: Can you locate certain tendencies of that canon or of that tradition with certain characteristics? MS: Its characteristics are of deconstruction: deconstructing the Western, everything that we learn from the Western ways of composing music or sounds—deconstructing them. I am not considered to be a person who plays improvised music. My album is completely constructed in terms of tempos and structure. This is a start, and a start is like unlearning all the influences that we had, constantly unlearning in terms of techniques, and also learning new techniques—it’s like a wheel that is constantly changing. For me personally—maybe many artists do not verbalise this—I like local music, which is extremely spatial. Even if they are not using spatial elements, it is extremely spatial and rounded within urban influences. Like you can feel the urban influences, the local environments, you can imagine environments while you listen. So it is quite grounded within atmospheres and environments which are very local and detached from outside environments. Many musicians from here went and played in Berlin or in other international festivals. I have played in a few places abroad but I still feel that there is something that should be grounded within the environment here. BC: Why was this unlearning necessary?

13  Jerusalem in My Heart is a live audio-visual performance project, with Montréal-based music producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Montréal-based filmmaker Erin Weisgerber. Their latest album is the highly acclaimed Qalaq (2021) released with Constellation Records.

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MS: Because what we are living now in terms of political outcome of international policies in the affected areas, if they are not addressed in sound and music urgently, will never be addressed anywhere else. Of course, they will be addressed in critical studies, but in terms of practice, no other practice will ever address them. I come from a background of Metal and Punk Rock sonic practice that appears to be counter-Western or counter-hegemonic but actually is not. And now that you understand that, it’s time to take a stand. It is an understanding of global politics and how music can actually connect to it. The only way you can connect to it is by starting to unlearn and move forward elsewhere from there; this is very interesting to see in many musicians here. It took me some time to understand it, but when I was listening to them, I was thinking why are they doing this, why are they playing this track in this way, why are they totally deconstructing the structure, why are they not using a tool that can guide them? But slowly I understood that it is a constant process of unlearning because it is a political standpoint against everything that is happening around them and everything that has been spoon-fed to them. It is like saying, ‘no, we do not want to eat from that spoon anymore’. So in sound practice, this is really important because after dealing with something for a certain amount of time you know that it is extremely shaped by its political environment. I can think of Jacques Attali, and his book Noise14 and how he translates every political era sonically. For me, it is not a metaphor but the truth. All sonic events and all the music practices whether it was punk rock, experimental music, metal or all such styles, were not shaped strictly by influences, they were shaped by reactions as well. So the reaction to something, to other styles of music, other styles of spaces and environments is really important. BC: Is it a form of decolonisation? MS: It is absolutely a form of decolonisation. Although, some groups are now doing events where they invite international artists and Western artists; it is nice what they are doing in terms of sound and how they’re dealing with them, how they are managing the spaces and imposing what style of music they want them to play here. This is a form of decolonisation. This is our style, this is our environ14  Attali, Jacques (1985). Noise: the political economy of music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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ment, this is our signature. If you are going to come here and play, you’re going to play in this environment and so you should know about it. I am referring to people like Frequent Defect. They are so active now and contributing a lot in terms of what is happening in music, in terms of experimental, noise, electronic or techno. They are trying to shape it, and sculpt it according to the area. I am definitely thinking of specific sound practices as decolonial practices. But it is a very detailed and rigorous act that should happen, so one should look into all the facets of it. Sometimes it does not look directly de-colonialist because a Western machine or instrument is being used. But how you are using it and changing the Western canon into a local canon is really interesting. We use them in very different ways and understand the machine in totally different ways. It reminds me, for instance, of the rise of hip hop and of dub when they were using sampling machines which were not made to be used that way. Early techno artists, like Juan Atkins were using drum machines in a completely different manner. They customised and shaped these as per their needs and this is a really important thing in sound: to hack into and customise. BC: I was looking at the so-called East–West division and confluence. I was looking at three different possible arenas of investigation— time, space, subjectivity. Temporality is so different in different cultural settings. For example, microtonality is a temporal experimentation of the duration, of auditory time, of unfolding sonic texture—a temporal exploration of texture with a particular attention to intricate tonal divisions and depth, that Western music has learnt so much from. MS: What you are talking about in terms of temporality and sound here in these areas is really shaped by a reaction;—I don’t know if it has already happened but I would love to see it happen—it is a reaction to Western systems of logistics, time management and population management or metrics, measurements, statistics. These Western structures cannot function here. If you look at the origins of music in this area, it was so extended. Until 100 years, a concert was of six hours’ length. BC: Yes, exactly that’s what I’m trying to say. The idea of temporality here in the Middle East or in South Asia or in Africa is so different from the Western canon—notions of time in music or sound.

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MS: It is about reaching a state of mind or state of being. It is not about producing or reproducing a performance as a form of labour. The idea of music and sound production in this area transcends such ideas. In terms of extreme financialisation that was happening in Lebanon, it is because Lebanon is extremely neo-liberalised, because of loans, taxes and the policies after the war. So this affects the music composition and the musical thinking in terms of temporality of a track or of a concert. As you said, it is shaping the subjectivity because at the same time, it is shaping the emotional labour the musician is putting; he cannot perform what he wants to perform, he cannot perform for four hours. For example, he cannot perform a drone-like sound work or iteration, which needs hours of building up because it is related to logistics like getting a venue, paying the musicians, people not being able to listen for hours and hours and so on. Tarek Atoui addressed this when he was curating the Sharjah Biennial a few years ago, and he invited Western musicians to read and interpret old Arabic Tarab vinyls that used to play for hours.15 He asked them to give their own interpretations because he wanted to recreate the whole experience but with tools that are not local. If you get someone local to play a Tarab performance it is a different thing, but when you get someone Westerner to play it, then it becomes a bit problematic. It becomes like a question to ask. In my opinion, this is what shapes a sense of subjectivity because people’s understanding of a track or a concert or a piece is shaped by Western values that are adequate to record, or adequate to production. The recording technology is something that is made to be sold, to be mass-produced; it is something that is made to be commodified but at the same time, it cannot talk for how music should in a space like here. The idea of unquantifiable experience is not something that is being worked on really well by the West, because with everything that is non-Western, whether it was ­Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese or Japanese, the idea of experience is something that is not quantifiable or something that is written. As we saw yesterday they wrote notes, they theorised on Arabic music 15  Tarek Atoui is a contemporary artist and composer from Lebanon who is currently living and working in Paris. Based on research in music history and traditional music practices, his work reflects the notion of instrument, and how it interacts with listening, composing and performing.

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after it was produced. There was no theory before it was produced. These artistic practices are not acts that can be quantified, and this is really important. As you know, the idea of quantifying experiences is something, which is extremely colonialist. Quantifying human feelings, quantifying labour, quantifying music, putting it in records and selling it. You can narrow it down to trans-Atlantic slave ship trade. We need to know the dimensions, how we can produce slaves, move them from one place to another and the same thing is applied to music. So even if I deal with Western forms of production and my creations are on records, at one point, I would still like to be liberated from this constraint. How is it possible to deconstruct this colonial conditioning of experience? In my opinion, it should be slowly introduced. Slow introduction of events that are not managed or sequenced in a linear way. Let’s think of another structure of organising events, another structure of producing music or recording the sound. That’s why I really like the recent Jerusalem in My Heart album because the album is bleeding all throughout the record. You do not know where it ends, you do not know when it starts. It is developing slowly, it is creating all these kinds of reiterations. It starts with a really structured form and then very slowly deconstructs. There is no actual discernible structure that you can understand from that album, which is really interesting. Interestingly enough these forms of production are really big in noise albums, like in Japanese noise albums, for example, and with how they used to do their interpretation with other musicians. You can notice the music bleeding all throughout album; it is not something that is really systematic or structured. And in my opinion, it should be like a slow introduction through concerts or nights that are open, and with musicians that are agile and can create such forms of music. There have been a lot of experimental musicians coming and playing together, one leaving and the other one coming. But I understand why they cannot continue doing it because there are fund issues, and logistics, the way people managing it, and money involved and so on. Also, the idea of space, or sonic perspective and spatiality or depth of field—another issue. Yes, the space can make a wholly different impact on these kinds of events because seated concerts are different from standing con-

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certs. How the sound systems are used is also something different because we are dealing with technology that is Western and we are trying to experiment with how we can implement this in our spaces because these traditional spaces of ours are disappearing. So in spaces that are non-traditional, contemporary or Western, how can we recreate a sense of spatial experience that was already there and but disappearing. I do not have a kind of fetish for traditionalist environments or patriotic feelings such as wanting Lebanon to become the way it was in old days, but I am talking in terms of music and experiences -how those spaces deal with reverb and how sound expands those spaces. These are really very interesting. As you know in Emily Thompson’s book16 she said that between 1930s and 1950s the architecture started becoming narrower and smaller so that forms of reverberation and echoes could be managed in a certain way. But in spaces of performance, we need different kinds of configurations. We need configurations that are a bit wider, ceilings that are higher, so that we can have experience of both the space and sound. Although I do not mind technology, sometimes it is nice to be able to do it without extreme sophistication. There is also an idea of confluence between Eastern and Western canons or sonic traditions. Different traditions meet and put up a certain formation of hybrid of cross-modalities. I do not mind that as long as it is not a strategy of normalisation, because those are very common. And sometimes I get a bit disappointed seeing younger or even older musicians being extremely soft towards this idea of normalisation. They are not enough rigorous against it, which is sort of problematic in this kind of environment. Today, it is the time of putting more effort. For the last 70 years, we have lost what we had and now it is the time to bring it back. Do you think it is a revivalist approach of going back to the roots? It is not revivalist or going back to the roots. It is about seeking influences and seeing how they can be applied now in order to see how they function now. It is not like that we want to go back and play this kind of traditionalist music, no. It is about how we can use

16  Thompson, Emily (2004). The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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everything that we have learnt so far, and develop it more and go somewhere more interesting with it. How we can use more advanced technologies and feed on all the canons that we had. BC: So it is about recognising rather than reviving? MS: Yeah, yeah.

CHAPTER 23

Alma Laprida

Alma Laprida was born in 1985 in San Miguel, Buenos Aires, Argentina. After living and working in Buenos Aires for ten years, she now lives in Maryland, USA. She studied piano at Julián Aguirre School of Music, Arts Management at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero and Electronic Arts at the same University. Alma composes and plays pieces for trumpet marine, synthesisers, lyre and other non-conventional instruments and objects such as megaphones, nylon bags, home appliances and toys. She works with sound using an intimate, contemporary language and explores the territories among composition, improvisation, performance and installation. She has played at Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), MUNTREF, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Spain Cultural Center in Buenos Aires (CCEBA), Espacio Fundación Telefónica, MicroMacro (Torino, Italy), La Cúpula (Córdoba), La Fábrica, Big Sur and Una.Casa, among others. She made sound installations at the Teatro Verdi (La Boca, Buenos Aires), at the gallery Valenzuela Kremmer (Bogotá, Colombia) and at CasaPlan for Festival Tsonami (Valparaíso, Chile). She gave a solo concert at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. She was a guest artist at the Festival

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Alma Laprida—AL. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_23

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Internacional de Musica Experimental de Sao Paulo, Brazil (FIME, 2015) and made a residency at GIS Studio of Audition Records (Mexico City, 2016). She released a solo album (Audition Records) and several pieces in compilations in the labels Adaptador Records, Ratordog, Sisters Triangla, Isla Visión, También Dormimos, Carbono Proyecto Records and Sub Rosa. She created the series of concerts Ciclo Hertz and a project for collaborations between visual and sound artists named Estrépito y contemplación. She also worked as a freelance curator for ConDiTLAB and Colectivo Micro. She was curator-in-chief at the Centro de Arte Sonoro, which depended on the Ministry of Culture (Argentina). She currently works as an assistant professor at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. I came to know about Alma Laprida’s work via different sources, such as Sonora, a feminist sound practitioner’s group in Brazil,1 and Impulsive Habitat label. The conversation here with Alma Laprida took place via email exchanges. We decided to follow up via a Zoom call, which is still forthcoming. BC: How did you come to work with sound art and experimental music? Please provide a personal background. AL: I grew up in a house where sound and music were important. Both my parents had studied music. My father is a music lover and my mom is a phono audiologist—a specialist both in speech and voice therapy but also in hearing. I first heard from her about frequencies and feedback and I even sometimes played with some of her working elements. My brother and I would look at each other’s ears with otoscopes and record stories and songs with her cassette recorder. I got interested in music when I was very little. My parents had a not too big, but nice collection of records. I used to listen to the records while dancing or even ‘acting’ to the sound of music. I remember one day we were listening to the White album from The Beatles. When ‘Revolution N. 9’ started, I didn’t know what to do with all that information. I asked my mom why the Beatles would do those sounds, and she said, ‘They’re having fun’. So I can track back to that moment the idea of experimental music as something related to having fun. In my teenage years, I got interested in jazz and improvisation and when I was 18, I started playing in a medieval music ensemble. We played versions of secular music of the eleventh to the thirteenth century with replicas of 1

 See:

http://www.sonora.me

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medieval instruments. With these non-conventional instruments, I learned about textures and about making arrangements, and I could think of music outside the tonal model. BC: What were the specific sparks for your interest in working with sound? AL: There were no specific memories I can recall. I don’t think I could have decided to do anything else. I was too small when I started feeling deeply connected with sound and music. I played non-stop with a melodica when I was two and I started studying music when I was three. At the end of the year, the music teacher said I should keep on studying because I was very interested. But hyperinflation came, and so I could not go on studying as there was only money for food. I learned to read music on my own with a book I borrowed from my grandfather. I would study alone for hours and hours with it, with a flute I found at home and with a small Casiotone keyboard. I also invented songs and improvised with the keyboard. Only when I was a teenager could my parents afford to pay for my guitar classes. Besides my interest in music, I was interested in sound itself: I enjoyed listening to the eerie sounds of silence during siesta time. Stores closed and there was almost no one in the streets from 2 to 4 PM where I grew up in San Miguel, a suburban area near Buenos Aires. Recording stories and inventing jingles with a cassette recorder meant that my brother and I would explore with and invent sound effects with the things that we had. BC: Who are the inspirations for your work with sound? Anyone or any source (person, label, organisation, group, band etc.) from Argentina or Latin America? AL: People who inspire me to work with sound are or were friends and teachers that have motivated me, invited me to play, helped me in different ways, such as Juan José Calarco, Guido Flichman, Cecilia Castro2, Jorge Haro, Pablo Reche, Martín Tarifeño, Nicolás Varchausky, Alan Courtis, Constanza Castagnet3 and Florencia

2  Cecilia Castro (born in Córdoba in 1980, she lives and works in Buenos Aires, ARG) Cecilia Castro is a composer and sound artist based in Buenos Aires. 3  Constanza Castagnet is an Argentinean artist currently living in Amsterdam who works with sound, writing, performance, and occasionally videos.

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Curci.4 I could think of many more who inspire me, of course (e.g. Laurie Anderson, Susan Fonseca, Ana María Romano, et al). BC: How are the sound cultures in Latin America different from the European/Western canon in your opinion? AL: Well, there are many different realities inside Latin America. And I can talk only about my personal experience. I live in Buenos Aires, a very peculiar city, and I’ve only visited Bolivia, Chile and Brazil -mostly big cities. I don’t know much about rural areas, for instance. Based on that, I like to think that maybe Latin America is noisy and a bit chaotic. Especially when you go to cities like La Paz in Bolivia. There, taxis honk to let you know that they’re available, and there are buses with people sitting next to the drivers whose job is to scream the route of the bus out the window through the entire ride. I have only been to Europe once, some years ago. I went to Venice and Berlin on that trip. Venice has no cars but has all those bells that surprised me. In Berlin, I was surprised by the silence in the city. I have never been to the States or Canada. What is the Western canon? Is it the music that is taught in conservatories? How much of it has an impact on everyday life? Is it something else? Is the Western canon equal to the music industry? BC: Yes, it is the shaping of a place’s sound cultural production through education and pedagogy that aim to withhold certain types of musical sounds over others by their inherent structures. What do you think of as ‘sound canons’ in the Latin American context? What are the traditional sounds in your opinion? AL: I see. I would maybe think of music genres that developed here and that are passed from generation through generation. Like folklore music—which is taught in some music schools and popular music conservatories, at least in Argentina. But also indigenous sound cultures, rituals and beliefs related to them—these would be traditional, I guess, but not part of the canon. They are not taught in formal education institutions.

4  Florencia Curci is a drummer, sound & radio artist and curator based in Buenos Aires. Her work focuses on noise and rhythmsas relative concepts that configure perception, communication and subjectivity. Her work was commissioned by Centro Cultural Kirchner, Cultural San Martín, Medialab Prado, Tsonami Festival, Aural Festival, Kunst Radio and Mayhem, amongst others.

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BC: Do you locate certain tendencies in your own work drawing ideas from these ritual and traditional sound cultures in Argentina, or in Latin America? Are there any? AL: Not in a very explicit way. But I think there could be something there in a more subtle way. I do feel represented by the words ‘noisy, a bit chaotic’ that I’ve mentioned before about sound cultures in Latin America. I like to be a bit untidy, even a bit careless sometimes. I can also find something related to my local culture in a broader way, which is sharing with others. I have worked many times in collaboration or in groups, which has a way of doing things and bonding I certainly enjoy. BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of time (e.g. duration, rhythm and temporality) in your work? AL: I often call what I compose, play (or ‘install’) a ‘piece’ instead of a ‘sound work’ because I feel that they are windows of time in which something happens. I don’t feel comfortable working with a pulsed rhythm. I am generally more comfortable with short pieces but I’ve been thinking of working on something longer. BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of space (e.g. perspective and depth of field) in your work? AL: I think a lot about sound and space in my work. I think that stereo setups for venues (a very typical disposition) are a practical convention, but only really work for one person in the place: the one who is in the sweet spot. So when I work on installations and sometimes when I play, I like to build non-homogeneous sound spaces, I like to use speakers of different sizes and qualities and distribute them unevenly in space. I feel weird when I think about quadraphonic or octophonic setups for my works. BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of free improvisation in your work? AL: To me, free improvisation has been sort of a ‘school’, a place to learn with others. Playing in the free improvisation scene for a while has given me a lot of confidence and experience. I consider it part of my musical education along with my studies of classical piano at a conservatory and of Electronic Arts at the University. I sometimes improvise in my concerts but I also compose. BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of attention in your work? AL: In my work, I like to explore different formats and possibilities. When I work in my pieces, I try to create something that would

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catch my own attention. Sometimes that means that I will work with non-traditional sound sources or instruments, or any other resource (a gesture, in a performance) that I think might surprise me or even make me laugh. Do you work with elements from Argentinian traditional music, such as Andean music or Tango? How do you like to relate to these folk aspects of Latin American sound culture, and how do you innovate on your own terms? I haven’t worked with those elements. The idea of ‘sound art’ or ‘sonic arts’ is departing from a typical Western musical system where tonal structures are discreet and quantifiable. How do you interpret the Latin American indigenous sounds as a sound artist? Do these ideas reflect in your artwork? Do you try to connect to the local sound? As an artist, I think that you have to be very careful and respectful about indigenous sounds and culture, especially if you don’t belong to an indigenous community. Just lately I’ve been in touch with some sounds and readings about them, but I haven’t created any piece from that. I don’t know if I will—I guess not. However, they make me question the way I see (and hear) the world and that might reflect in my artwork in a more indirect way. Do you think there is a confluence of cultures, between Latin America and Europe, and between the Global North and Global South in your work? How do you identify yourself? Or do you like to be a ‘globalised’ artist? Why? I used to think I was a ‘globalised’ artist when I began making my own music. But later I started to question that and to pay more attention to what is going on near me, as part of a local community. The idea of a ‘confluence’ of cultures is just too neutral. What is your comment on European colonisation of Latin American sound and listening? How do you like to decolonise sounds in your own work? I have been reading and attending lectures on Decolonial Studies lately, which is stimulating as it raises many questions. I can’t say if I’m decolonising sounds in my work—I prefer other people to make an interpretation of my work. However, as an undergraduate teacher, I find it important to make students know about artists from Argentina and Latin America as well as our local history. This

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may not sound too innovative for some people, but many courses only teach art from Europe and the USA. BC: How do you engage with the audience? Do you like to entertain them? AL: I create pieces thinking about what would surprise me or interest me if I were the audience. I certainly do not think of entertainment, and I don’t always do it, but I do like to ‘give a wink’ to the people who are sharing space and time with me, for instance, by taking care of visual elements, sometimes in a very simple way. There were some performances in which I played a synthesiser and while I was playing, I would take very small toys out of a bag, one by one, and arrange them so that people could see them. I also like to invite people to participate sometimes, to make people feel a part of what’s going on. In that way, I also like working with non-musicians.

CHAPTER 24

Constanza Bizraelli

Constanza Bizraelli aka CAO is a Peruvian electronic music composer and producer, artist and theorist. She is the director and editor-in-chief of Cyclops Journal, an academic publication dedicated to contemporary theory, theory of religion and experimental theory. The conversation with Constanza Bizraelli took place over Zoom. Due to bandwidth issues, we had to switch off the video, and therefore, our respective screen avatars were also in dialogue. BC: Let us begin with your artistic background, your coming to work with sound in general. CB: Well basically, I am a musician, I am a music composer and I’ve been a music composer for many many years. I am originally from Lima, Peru. I started making music roughly around the early 2000s and around that time I used to have an experimental folk band, I used to have an experimental folk project, and my origins as a music composer started from different scenes of underground music. I used to play the guitar and I started developing experimental ways of playing the guitar around those years. But I was coming more from extreme underground music genres such as punk, black metal,

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Constanza Bizraelli—CB © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_24

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and so on. I was really interested in folklore, in the idea of folkloric music more rather than specific folkloric music from my country Peru. I was interested in the abstract idea of folklore and how to bring that into music without relying on certain aspects of a given tradition. At the time, I also studied philosophy. I did my bachelor’s degree when I was in Peru and I was also writing about this; I had a thesis called ‘Inner Folklore Aesthetics of the Hyperearthly’ but it was connected to my music practice back then—my theoretical practice and my music practice were like connected. In the year 2013, I moved to the UK; I moved to London and in that year I started learning traditional electronic music. I would say that the leap from my previous project towards relying more on acoustic— well not acoustic instruments, but I was playing the guitar and I was using a lot of different tools like pedals and different tools for altering the sounds. The music was in-between songwriting and experimental but it wasn’t electronic. When I moved to the UK, I started producing and composing electronic music and the name of my project that I started in 2014, more or less, in the UK is called Cao.1 The name Cao comes from Peru as well, it is an archaeological site where they unearth these mummies from this ancient empress. The ancient culture is called Moche, Mochica, and the area is on the north coast of Peru. The area is a desert type of area near the sea. I was very into ancient Peruvian cultures like I was also very into cosmology, philosophy, and cosmologies from ancient cultures and I was specifically into this Moche culture.2 So because I was inspired by it, I decided to name my project after it so I named my project Cao, which was the actual archaeological site. I took a lot of inspiration from this because it was also related to my philosophy practice in a way as well—this kind of interest in the sacred, the 1  Listen: https://radicalsoundslatinamerica.com/2020/08/19/radical-sounds-latinamerica-mix-05-cao/. 2  According to the World History Encyclopedia, the Moche civilisation flourished along the northern coast and valleys of ancient Peru, between 1 CE and 800 CE. The Moche state spread to eventually cover an area from the Huarmey Valley in the south to the Piura Valley in the North, and they even extended their influence as far afield as the Chincha Islands. Moche territory was divided linguistically by two separate but related languages: Muchic (spoken North of the Lambayeque Valley) and Quingan. The two areas also display slightly different artistic and architectural trends and so the Moche state may be better described as a loose confederacy rather than a single, unified entity (Mark Cartwright, 2014).

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ancient ideas of the sacred. So that is how I started my electronic music practice and then two or three years later, I started shifting. Well, I compose electronic music regularly but I also started the transition into sound art as a practice, and I started with sound spatialisation technologies. So my first project was developed in Germany and was also inspired by this ancient culture. It was a collaboration with an Australian artist based in Germany called Michael Tan. We did an audiovisual collaboration. I did a residency at the ZKM in Germany3 and the work was presented in a collective exhibition called Hexadome in Berlin. It was a work that was heavily influenced by the idea of cosmology in the Mochica culture, but it was focused specifically on the notion of ceremonial objects and what that means: what does the ceremonial object entail, what sort of concepts entail these major concepts of ceremonial action or ritual action. Works are kind of long research projects but in the end, it was a composition—a music composition—and then a sound spatialisation over a system of 55 speakers that were configured in a dome kind of structure. Well, this was around 2018—so not so long ago—and then after this, since I am also very much into science, especially conceptual science, my latest project is a combination or a fusion between conceptual science, researching ancient ideas of cosmology or the relation between the psyche/the mind and the idea of cosmos. Well, that takes a big deal of philosophical as well as sonic perspectives. So the last project I developed is still ongoing but it had its first presentation last month in Budapest. I have worked on this project for two years already; it started as more of a research into the theory of general relativity and the notion of space-time present in the theory of general relativity from a conceptional standpoint. And then it transitioned into how we think about that from the point of view of sound. So it was, let’s say, a sound seeing the idea of space-­time from the point of view of sound and that translating into an idea/concept for an installation. But then with time, I developed interests in ancient cosmologies and ways in which the mind and the cosmos historically have been related. So it kind of follows and combines together into this project which is called ‘Auralisms: the relativity of acoustic presence’. In the end, the project was more



3

 ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe.

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an exploration of the acoustic presence or the aura—let’s say presence in space. It was taking elements from General Relativity but also elements from ancient doctrines related to the subtle body and kind of merging these elements. The project in itself has a very broad conceptual part but then also an algorithm that was basically managing the sound spatialisation; it is a project that works with spatialisation and it is a sound interactive installation so when users are going inside of the space they trigger changes and modifications in the spatialisations and these changes are controlled by these algorithms, and these changes take place at different layers conceptually correlated to time and space. The idea is that the user can listen to their own presence or that they have a particular signature of presence, aura presence, in space. This project was developed at the SSI, the Spatial Sound Institute, in Budapest with 40 sound systems which is a technology originally developed here in—it is originally Dutch, from the Netherlands.4 That was the first development phase and it was shown there at the end of July and it is going to be shown here also in Amsterdam at some point, I am working on that. It is an ongoing research, so this was, let’s say, the first part of the first phase of the actual project. Well, apart from this project I also run a publication called Cyclops that is a contemporary theory, experimental theory, contemporary philosophy publication—an online publication with open access.5 2020 I released an EP as well like the EP I released in 2020 with an American label called CLUB CHI.6 I have also released other materials in the previous years but, yes, I don’t know if that is the kind of summary of my activities and my transitions there over the years. BC: Thanks for giving a background, a real comprehensive background of your work in a nutshell. I was wondering about the very genesis of your work because you mentioned that you were influenced by underground electronic music as a practitioner, musician or composer, and at the same time you were inspired by the cosmologies and the traditional Peruvian mythologies, religious rituals and archaeological evidences. How did you breed these two worlds?  https://spatialsoundinstitute.com.  Cyclops is a journal of Contemporary Theory, Theory of Religion and Experimental Theory: https://cyclopsjournal.net. 6  Label page: https://clubchai.bandcamp.com/. 4 5

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CB: At the very beginning was my first project with the experimental folk project: I mean I was very young at that time and I was very into Black Metal. And when I was into this genre, when I was listening to it a lot, what got me about it was that for me it didn’t sound like metal, like most of the metal music I had listened to so far. It sounded like something completely different, almost as if it was some kind of Nordic folkloric music and some of it was similar actually to some folk music from the highlands of Peru. When I heard of it, when I listened to it, it felt like it was some kind of depiction of the raw forces of nature in a way to me and it just felt very far away from metal. That was something that really got my attention about it and I guess my idea of folkloric cosmology was something that was not related to a specific practice at that time or not related to a specific theory or theories or practitioner, it was more a stance of orientation I had in my own city or the way in which I used to conceive spaces; it was something very intuitive for me and which later I found conceptualised in authors or practitioners. In the beginning, it was very intuitive and very instinctive in a way and when I found these genres I discovered these—I don’t know how to say this—but this kind of mode of music and when I started making my own music I had that coming out in a way that was more or less native in a way or inherent to specific inhabitants of the place, let’s say the city that I was living in; in a way I was not relying on any traditional elements. At least a lot of folkloric projects or folk contemporary projects would define themselves as folk-­ related because they were appropriating certain rhythms or certain styles or techniques from traditional music or traditional sound practices from a specific place. In the case of the project I had, I wasn’t trying to do that, it was just that I was trying to make music that was, I don’t know how to explain it; it was as if it was fused with the environment. It was more about the environment; the environment in itself as an abstract thing rather than taking a look at specific models that are already conceived over a tradition. So it was more an idea, I would say, to have this abstract. I was conceiving the idea of folklore as a gaze or a way to look at reality rather than something that you would need to place yourself in a very long timeline, in traditional time and let’s say to consider yourself as part of a tradition. It was more the way to look at the environment or a way to look at the environment in which there was a

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relation of immediateness with the environment or sort of a liminal space—there was no division between the person or group and the environment and the music emerges from that state, from that non-­ binary state. For me, that was what folk was about. This was more rooted in an idea rather than following a specific tradition or a specific practitioner, and when I listened to black metal that was what I had from it, that was one of the reasons I was interested in it from the very beginning. I listen to very different genres of music, I am always very eclectic. I would say the first album, the earliest music, or a piece were coming from these kinds of ideas. BC: This canon—if I consider this knowledge—these cosmologies and the influences as canons you had at the beginning of your work with sound canonisation of the situated knowledge that you had were based on cosmologies of Peru, Peruvian landscapes, and their folkloric knowledge, their folkloric traditions. Then you mentioned that you started to work with sound art when you moved to the UK. Sound art has a specific canonical text available, like, for example, John Cage, the American minimalist school, works of La Monte Young or sound works by Alvin Lucier or Max Neuhaus. These are the sources from where—also from Fluxus—the traditional aspects of sound art emerged. This connection to a canonical literature, canonical ideas are very Western dominated. When you mentioned that you started working with sound art, how did you get to engage with this particular sound art canon in the West? What was the spark? CB: I would say that I didn’t try to adapt—I mean basically the transition into sound art happened in a kind of natural way. Basically what I wanted to do with sound art was something very similar to what I was doing with philosophy or rather my idea was to use sound as a platform for asking certain questions in a way that one cannot use discourse, for example. Because when you use discourse to ask questions you are already embedded in a fixity or a crystallisation that comes with the words, that comes with the terms in themselves. When I was doing this mental exercise of trying to do something similar like the action of asking questions within sound, the outcome was way more flexible and open basically. For my latest project, for instance, my main idea was to propose or to try to search for an intuition of space-time and I could have asked something similar in the context of philosophy; I could have tried to conceptualise an intuition that’s non-conditioned by what

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s­ pace-­time brings to experience like sensorial experiences in itself. I found it more difficult to do it because when I am in the field of discourse I am already in a kind of fixity. So when I place the questions in sound, you see sound is also addressed by the senses and so the answer to those questions are not only understood or addressed through the mind, but they are also felt in a way that can be deduced and described but it cannot really necessarily be explained. So this was one of the things that attracted me to using sound as a vehicle for theorising in a way, to theorising an intuition of space-time that could be accessed through sound or through listening, through the act of listening. Why were you so interested in space, or acoustic space, as a fundamental element of your inquiry? Why was I interested in space? Spatialisation or the notion of space-­ time in itself? Space and spatialisation using sound. Was it related to your cosmological inquiry or influence in Peruvian folklore, or was there any other trigger? I wouldn’t say it was directly related to Peruvian folklore. I am also interested in astronomy. Apart from my sound and composition practices I was already interested in physics from a long time ago and it was not related. Everything happened to come together in one practice—I mean basically I found that in sound spatialisation practice as a practice or as a technique, I could put together a lot of fields of inquiry that I had in the realm of science and also in the realm of philosophy through these practices that were more related to cosmology. But yes it happened to be that specifically in this practice I could have them come together into one sort of integral way of doing artwork, in a way. When you started working in sound arts specifically, did you have a canon in mind? Did you have any canonical figures that you were influenced by or inspired by? I would have to think about that. I mean, do I have a specific sound artist that I was influenced by? I don’t think so. I have influences from different fields like specific musicians and philosophers and filmmakers but a specific sound artist that I was specifically influenced by I cannot remember. I am sure that I might have had some influence but I don’t recall it at this very moment.

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BC: Can you name some of the musicians and philosophers that influenced your work with sound art? And maybe a little bit of a word about them? CB: Yeah, I mean music-wise one of my main influences when I started making electronic music was Coil, the duo. They were one of my main influences. And in general industrial was a very strong influence at the beginning of my practice but then there were a lot of genres too. I was also very influenced by crowd rock music and space rock music. I also had a lot of influences from disco, space disco of the late 70s and early 80s. And another more subtle influence that is not very evident I would say is psychedelic cumbia from South America. Psychedelic Cumbia is both influenced by psychedelic rock and folkloric music from Peru but I will say that that is very influential but not in a very obvious way in my music. Also, artists like Sun Ra were very influential for me. And in general, artists that were mixing music with mysticism because I’ve been very much into these types of practices combining music and sound with mysticism or occultism, which has been very influential to me. BC: Right. When you moved to the UK, you had a larger exposure to sound art in the UK and in Europe, in the Western world. How was it? CB: It was a bit strange at the beginning because at the beginning I didn’t have much exposure to sound art and I was basically just focused on making electronic music but then it happened that most of the places in which I could perform were galleries or spaces or events that were also showcasing sound art projects. So when I started performing live in London, I started getting to know the world of sound art because of the places where I would perform and I would see the work of other artists in the field; I was also part of a radio that was devoted to sound art, they were interested in my work because my electronic music work was also very experimental so it could easily fall along the lines of sound art in a different context of exhibitions or performances. So I started getting to know the scene in the UK and I started getting familiar with it. In the beginning, I was not exposed to it at all so it was something new that I discovered. And it was accidental in a way; I mean I didn’t search for it. BC: That was 2016 or 2017? CB: That was around 2014.

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BC: So you were a master’s student then? CB: Yes, I went to London actually to do a master’s in art theory and philosophy. BC: And then did you also get involved with spatialisation at that time? You wanted to explore sound multichannel spatialisation. How did that happen—working with spatial sound? CB: I went to an exhibition once in London—well it was actually an exhibition and an artist talk, and they were discussing some artwork and that is when I heard it first—I mean I knew it existed even since I was in Peru. I was always curious but I never had the chance to actually experience it and then I went to this exhibition and I started becoming interested in it but it was not until 2018 when I had the chance to actually compose for a system (multichannel system) that I had the opportunity to actually do a work and experience the possibilities. BC: And the work that you mentioned in London that you visited, what was it? CB: Unfortunately, I cannot remember right now but I remember it was a collective exhibition. BC: With multichannel sounds, like ambisonics? CB: Yes. BC: In the electronic music performances that you were practising so far, they were stereophonic or two-channel live performances. But then you got interested in surround sound, multichannel sound and spatialisation—movement of sound in space. How did that interest develop? CB: In the beginning, it was just a curiosity and an interest and then I did my first work in the context of the Hexadome exhibition—it was not a very long residency, it was a three weeks residency that I did at ZKM where I was working with their system and with a software for getting out the design of the spatialisation. I saw the possibilities and I was very interested in exploring more but unfortunately the time frame was not so long. But then it left me with even more curiosity after I worked on that piece, and when I started one year later, I started conceptualising what was ‘Auralisms’—the project I told you about before, and in that project, I wanted to explore other possibilities of technologies, different possibilities of technologies for sound spatialisation. The idea with my installation was that the sound spatialisation is controlled

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by a ­custom software and this custom software is based on an algorithm that I wrote. I was very interested in programming different ways of spatialisation that could be reactive or altered by user interaction. At least for this project, this was very important. But in this I was not only interested in doing a spatialisation design that was fixed but I was interested in designing an experience that could change always—with every person that enters, it’s a different experience. It can change but it is another random change. In this project I would say I went way deeper into this field. BC: And this idea of audience activating or performing or participating in this spatialisation technique, was it sensor based? Did you use sensors to get inputs from the audience participation? CB: Yes, basically I worked with an interactive system called Pulsic that is a user-tracking device and with it I could get information from position but that information from position could be translated into velocity, acceleration and other input values. There were many different types of data in this installation that I was obtaining from users—there was speed, there was acceleration, position, and then there were other parameters that were not related to the displacements of the users inside of the space but were related to some questions that the users were being asked before entering in the installation space. So there was this app that was developed for the iPad and the user had to complete a questionnaire before entering the space. These questionnaires were also put in some values and all of these values were coming together to configure what this specific signature was for, but, of course, this was not so simple because it was also related to general relativity. You must be familiar with general relativity and the idea that celestial bodies affect space-time as a sort of elastic kind of fabric. So when there is a celestial body that has a specific index of energy, that celestial object produces a curve in space-time that corresponds to the density of the celestial body. So this was the main idea for the concept that every user was like a parallel to a celestial body that was produced in an index of curvatures in the sound field—instead of the space-time field, the sound field because in the installation sound was a metaphor of space-time So somebody entering the space was altering the sound field and was altering it by deforming it, by creating a curvature. That curvature was translated into a topological alteration of the sound field and all of this was controlled by the algorithm and with data from

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the users. This was happening at two levels: it would happen as a geometrical deformation, as a topological deformation of the sound field was happening at the spatialisation and at the intrinsic sound; so at the level of just the music, the music was also changing. There were many levels at which these changes were taking place and all of these changes were taking place with information received from the users. You’re referring to your Auralism project in terms of auditory presence. Do you consider this sense of presence as a material presence or also mythological and imagined presences? I mean the concept of presence was kind of between material and immaterial because the presence was ultimately in the context of the installation and was an effect on the medium. So basically the medium was the sound field and the person was like a rock being thrown over a pond and producing some curvatures and some weight patterns that propagate. So the presence of people—of users at the surface—was framed as a disturbance in the field, a curvature in the field, at the formation field all of these types of elements or disturbances. So that is why the idea of presence was in between something material but not actually tangible as such; it was in-­ between material and immaterial and that is why the idea of presence as it was conceptualised was also imbedded or open for this theory—for example, in Vedic theories about the subtle bodies or doctrines they talk about seven substance body. All of this was very interesting to me when I was doing the research because it was talking about an index of presence that was more based on energy as a measurement of intensive changes/changes of intensity that are not necessarily tangible as matter, but because of the nature of sound, sound can address these kinds of realms or ideas of realms. So that is why I would say it’s in-between. You mentioned Vedic philosophy? I was reading about the doctrines of the subtle bodies. The literature I was more into was theosophical literature and was already based on Indian doctrines about subtle and energy bodies. I think that you are referring to a particular kind of presence. Presence often has different layers: one is the material presence and the other that is in Smriti or in the memory. In other words, presences have different layers: one is the actual presence that is a tangible everyday presence, for example, you meet someone on the

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street; and the other is the memory presences that are associative. I am trying to understand the methods and conceptual positions that you are taking while thinking through the idea of presence in the Auralisms project. CB: The idea of presence was very experimental. So presence was at the beginning conceptualised because of the concept of the project as something that is in between material and immaterial and something that is conceptualised as an effect or as a disturbance. But then, it is also experimental in the sense that I don’t feel comfortable framing it before seeing the results or seeing what happens in the actual installation space. So it also stems from the experience; once the installation was completed or the process of development was finalised then feeling or experiencing it would hint at different aspects of it. BC: Was it something that you can relate to your earlier interest in the cosmologies from Peru, Peruvian culture, and folklore? CB: To the idea of cosmology definitely, because the conceptual part of my thesis was the one I described before but then there was another part that was related to the music in itself, like the sound composition and that was rooted in a different concept, I would say. It was rooted on the idea of the relationship between the mind and the cosmos—the idea of the universe or the idea of the cosmos in a way. I was interested in the exploration of ancient thought forms related to the universe or cosmos or to cosmology. In this sense, the piece had seven movements and each movement was a different thought-­ form. So there was a thought-form that was about this period of exploration and curiosity, for instance, into whatever is out there in the skies. There was another one that was more about fear and horror. I call this one ‘horror of his fears’ because of the ancient cosmological relations between certain constellations and certain forms; basically, the realm of astrology and the correlation between different mythological figures and different cosmological bodies, like celestial objects. Also, other ones were related to the fear that was produced in relation to the advent of certain non-favourable events. This can be related to ancient Peruvian cultures because there was a whole system of ritual activities that were developed in order to prevent disasters from happening and they were all connected to the religion, the system of beliefs that they had, and how

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those were correlated in some ways to stars. So, yeah, there are definitely connections, specifically in this part of the piece I would say. I would like to understand the work and the processes behind conceptualising this work. Perhaps there was a strong interest in bringing the temporalities of the technological, temporality of spatial sound techniques and cosmological temporality that you were interested in in your earlier practice. Yes, definitely. The exploration of time was one of the things that triggered my curiosity. Actually, when composing the music I wanted to create an ambience or a sort of atmosphere that felt future-oriented but something ancient at the same time, so it was something in between I would say. But, yeah, it is completely like this, like you described before. And in doing so were you also interested to find out the difference and the confluences between different temporalities? Such as the Western temporality which is more progress-oriented, linear in a way, and the other temporalities which are cyclical, parabolic, or other kinds of geometric temporality? That is very interesting. I thought about this but I didn’t develop it in the work at this very stage. For example, in the part of the music piece that I was mentioning, some of the movements were related to this sort of cyclical temporality. For example, the horror of the spheres part had everything to do with the cyclical because when a disaster or a catastrophe that is correlated to certain astronomical figures happens once, it is going to return again at some point, so there is this cyclical element. With the more linear temporality, I would say that I had that in mind also in some parts of the piece or some movements that were more related to the spirit like the venturing or the exploration or this sort of spirit of conquest in a way or I don’t know how to describe it. I didn’t frame it as such but I think it is a very interesting point. Do you think there is a difference in ways of listening in the West and the non-West—in your case in Latin America and Peru? Ways of listening? I think there are definitely differences. Where I grew up in Lima there was a mixture that was very intense between a lot of different elements from the West (like there is a lot of influence of Western culture), but that’s mixed with what is more typical of or original from Peru, let’s say. But everything is very mixed. So sometimes coming from that mixture, it is difficult to see the

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­ ifferences because I feel like in my practice they were kind of fused d in a way that was built-in in my approach because of where I come from, so I can definitely see it. I can try to separate one part in my point of view, but I do believe that there are definitely differences. But I would definitely have to think more about how I could specifically pinpoint specific differences. Do you also think there is a chance or possibility of confluence between these different approaches of listening and sound production, in general? Confluence in the sense of merging or coalescing of these different approaches. I do think that; yes, there is a possibility of confluence. I think that everything can be fused in a way. When you spoke before you had this point about the circular, cyclic, temporalities and the linear temporalities, I do feel more aligned with the cyclical temporalities even if the place of my upbringing or where I grew up had this approach necessarily, but I kind of found that approach through music practices in a way. To reconcile both points of views would be challenging but not impossible, I think. You were thinking about cyclical and when there is a cyclical element that means that you are going back to memory, going back to presences that are non-material. In your projects do you think this confluence between East and West—not like a binary form but if we think about different ways of listening—those different ways of listening coalesce or merge? Sorry can you repeat the question? I didn’t hear you very well because of the connection. So I was wondering whether in your work you practice this confluence between different ways of listening particularly East and West since you moved to the West from the Global South and you have exposed your work and you got exposure to sound art in the West, so do you find it more useful to think about confluence or are you also aware of your own background? I think after moving to Europe I became more aware of my own background, that is for sure. I am not sure if it is because of the exposure to the way practices are being held in this side of the world that created the emphasis by opposition or by tension to the way or my earlier approach or the way I was used to having a perspective on this topic and these ideas. I don’t think that in my work I am thinking about these decisions of the West and East constantly.

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For instance, in my project Auralisms definitely, I would say I tried to reconcile this in a way because there was a part of the project that was rooted in Western science like general relativity. There is another part that is connected to this idea of the substent bodies or their elements being more cyclical. In a way I didn’t do it on purpose. I would say I was doing it on purpose from a more theoretical standpoint in relation to science. The decision between science and spirituality, let’s say, or the decision between pragmatic or rational thinking and a way of thinking that is more based on analogy or synchronicity or other patterns of thought were central here. It was not connected necessarily to the causality of thought. So I was kind of trying to generate a bridge in between those two but you could also say by doing so there was also a merging of a deeper action, of merging two perspectives: one that belongs to the West in a way and one that is more rooted in a thought that was proper to, for instance, ancient South America or ancient civilisations in the area of Peru or Latin America. Do you think that your work is also concerned about decolonisation or influenced or enlightened by, or informed by, the idea of decolonisation and colonial history? It is not something that I have conceptualised in thinking about it in my work so far but it is something that I am interested in, but I haven’t had the chance to put the concept into my work so far. But that is something that I am definitely interested in. In what way do you like to engage with this concept of this particular issue of the colonial relationship between East and West? And how do you think it will reflect in your work? In which form? That is difficult since I haven’t been—I mean it is a topic that I am interested in but it’s not something that I have profoundly researched yet. I think at this stage it would be difficult for me to answer that question. But maybe in the future once I have explored more the field of post-colonial theory then I could be more able to give you an answer for that. Another thing I was curious about since you mentioned that you are very much interested in the audience participating in your work, is it something you would like to explore in view of non-Western ontology in which it is more community-oriented rather than having an individual presence? Is it something driven by the sense of community?

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CB: I think that originally the idea was just to have whoever enters in the space to get to know their own presence through listening and it was interesting to have not just one person but to have a group of people. Of course, there was limitation regarding the number of people because of the number of devices, for instance, or technical aspects that were not allowing many people to be inside the space and also for this installation, it was necessary to leave some space for the person to be able to listen so if there were too many people the person would not have enough space to be able to perceive these things. One thing that was interesting that I had the chance to see and maybe the audience couldn’t access, was the configurations in the topology of the space that a group was creating that was never the same. Like a group was creating a particular topology of space-­ time via sound which another group was never going to repeat because all the index values were different interaction wise, everything was different, the users were moving at different speeds with different indexes. I did this presentation in time slots so every 10  minutes there was a different group. Every time a group was entering there was a particular, special, and unique (I would say) configuration of forces—like sound forces or sound spatial topologies—that were unique to that specific group and I thought that this was a very interesting idea as well and this was also one of the reasons why I was interested in doing it in groups rather than single persons because this element could be observed afterwards and maybe studied or conceptualised later on. BC: Do you still like to revisit your interest in cosmologies of the Peruvian folklore? Do you like to go back? I mean after living in Europe for the last six to seven years, right? Are you interested in revisiting the folkloric knowledge that started or triggered your practice? CB: Yes, definitely. I would say that my last EP Cao is very influenced by the Amazon region of Peru. The music is very inspired by those regions and is very inspired as well by certain aspects of cosmological thoughts of those regions. So I am constantly interested in this. It is a constant interest that I am always going back to, especially in my music production. Yes, so it is something ongoing, I would say. BC: So this music production is informed by a particular environmental or ambient influence from the folkloric rather than having a model or pattern that you follow? How is it that you are influenced by the

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ambience and environment of the practices of folklores? Can you elaborate a little bit, to just enlighten the previous comment that you made? CB: I think it’s been something that is very difficult for me, it’s more like something related to the experience of the environment that finds a direct way in music. At least for me, it has always done this: whenever I was having a very strong experience of a given environment, music was a very direct way to communicate that in a way. I have this feeling of the environment that sounds like this and then I have a music sound piece that is directly addressing that environmental configuration, in a way. I think that is why then also my project Auralisms has to do with the configuration of forces or of topologies of an environment—it was more abstract and more related to space-time. But yeah this has always been the case. Like when growing up in Lima and going to different neighbourhoods and different areas that had different particularities to them or different aspects more highlighted or less highlighted or the architecture or elements in the communal livelihood’s different areas, it was as if sound was a direct vehicle to express those aspects that were essential to those places and this is the way I’ve been working basically. So I go visit the Amazonian forest, I’ve been there and I’ve had experiences and experiences not only of the environmental landscapes and so on, but experiences in the lifestyle activities and so on. Of course, there were some elements that were, I would say, could be more highlighted. For example, if I listen to typical music—some music that is folkloric, specifically folkloric—I can get inspiration from those but not in a very elaborated way; it is more in a more loose form that I get these impressions that get somehow coagulated into sounds afterward. Also, there is a lot of use of reverbs and delays, and these types of effects that also help generate this openness of sensations of space that I also like to introduce or create the sensation of an ambience. BC: The question of identity, if I ask you about what sort of identity do you like to project yourself with. For example, are you comfortable with being termed as a Peruvian sound artist or you like to have a more universal kind of, global kind of, identity? CB: I think I am comfortable with both because if I chose global that would be nonspecific to a specific place. But I think I am in conflict with answering that question because it would be very difficult to

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choose. From one side I like the global aspect, like the universal aspect of it, but I am also very connected to my Peruvian background. I feel like it is very connected to my work, in the way of music as well—especially music. So, yes, it would be difficult, I always say that I am Peruvian when I have to present myself or when they ask me something that I mention, but also I don’t like to be exoticised for that. That is something that I don’t like very much about saying that I am Peruvian because it tends to happen quite often, especially in European environments. And in the European environments do you have an impression of that? How do you like to describe your life in Europe, in general as a sound practitioner? Is it something you can describe or do you have some impressions of being in Europe? I think it has shifted a lot. Like in London I had a completely different experience, for example, than the experience that I am having here in Amsterdam. It’s been very different because of the scenes or the music scenes or the types of scenes in which I was performing or playing. When I was in London I was more in contact with the underground electronic music scene and then the experimental music scene and the sound art kind of environments and here in Amsterdam I’ve been more in contact with the art world and with some sound art and radio projects and more events that were more connected to club culture. So it’s been completely different environments in both places, in both cities. I would say that there was a big shift from when I used to live in Lima that I oriented more myself to. Here in Europe, I oriented myself more to research and then to sound art, something that I was not thinking about when I was living in Peru. I think we are almost at the end of the interview, or conversation, and I wanted to ask you one final question about your future projects. What do you envisage yourself working with in the future? And do you like to think of yourself integrated more and more into European/Western sound practices, resisting exoticisation of your identity but also having a distinct voice of your own? In terms of future projects I want to continue working on this project in Auralisms, because I think it’s ongoing. I already have more ideas for developing other aspects of it and I am also working on a paper that is about the research and the algorithm and all the theoretical research about it. Also working on the issue of Cyclops which

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is the journal that I edit and also working on new music. So there are lots of projects that I want to keep working on. I think I mentioned that I am also interested in astrology, which is something that I’ve been studying for a while now that compliments a lot of my practice as well. Astrology in the sense of speculative ideas around the connection between human action and human destiny in relation to the astronomical presences or phenomena? Yeah, it’s more like the study of all the culture that was surrounding the ideas of the cosmos and all the different aspects in which the idea of the cosmos was divided from the different cultural perspectives. Because then again you have Indigenous astrology, and then you have Western astrology, then you have astrology that was practised in America and astrology practised in Asia, so there is a lot of information. But yes, it is about the correlation between celestial events and earthly events in a way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be oriented to predicting outcomes or predicting the future, it is just a cultural study of correlations that were observed or elaborated in different practices throughout history. Okay. Any comments that you would like to make? Yeah. I am very interested in this idea of temporality that you described. I think it is very interesting. I would like to think about that at some point. Maybe in this constant research at some point, I would incorporate this idea more because I think there are a lot of different elements that need to be incorporated but it’s a slow process because it is a long-term research project. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you as well for the interview and congratulations for your book.

CHAPTER 25

Zouheir Atbane

The conversation with Zouheir Atbane was recorded in Casablanca in 2018. We were sitting in a music school for children, and the instrumental rehearsals were the auditory settings of the dialogue. I got to know about Zouheir’s work through research in the MENA region. I got his contact via Le Cube, Rabat. BC: To introduce the project Connecting Resonances, it’s a postdoc project that I started in 2018–2019. I’m examining the practice of sound in the Global South (GS), primarily the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Latin America. I’m gathering insights not only about the artists but also about their methods and their approaches. The primary questions are: whether the artists and thinkers with roots in the GS working with sound have distinctive ways of listening that carry traces of their backgrounds and traditional knowledge systems in sound. Can you, a Global South artist call yourself a ‘sound artist’ as it’s a European, Western modernist approach in listening, nomenclature and taxonomy? I would like to question this taxonomical model. My particular interest in this conversation is in understanding your approach as a sound practitioner. When

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Zouheir Atbane—ZA. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_25

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you call yourself a sound artist, is there decoloniality embedded in your practice, in the sense that your work is taking the nomenclature and definitions from the Western coinage of ‘sound art’? But at the same time are you also taking cues, inspirations, motivations, materials and other resourcing from your situated knowledge? Through this dialogue, possibilities of decolonial approaches and methods in sound are unpacked. ZA: For me firstly, when I begin to give in to sound, it’s really just a personal discovery, it’s not about putting a name on a practice. Because maybe today in our artistic practice we need to put a name on artists, but I consider myself an artist. I am very open about different practices because before I’m a musician, I’m also a contemporary dancer, and for me, it’s a mixture. It’s not just about sound or body or light—it’s about the moment you need to explore something. For me, this is art. It’s not about giving a closed identity, and we are in that today. When we begin to question sounds, it’s about my personal feelings between a body: a dancer-body and a musician. It’s like I have two parallel lines and they begin to cross and have some connection, and it is interesting because it pushes you to have more and more questions about what is justice. What is a good thing is to take every time you cross these two lines; for me this is sound. In Morocco, we have a lot of cultural sound practice, but it’s really not a scientific thing, it’s just normal. It’s common to be in some space and they have some dance music. One time I was like a good audience, having fun, and another time I took myself outside of my person. Being in the fun and taking time to observe my artistic question while being inside to have another approach and another experience for the same things. And with this, I began to discover a lot of things. For me, I began to think: ‘Wow, we have a big potential in being in some sound experience— Moroccan sound experience—but we need to put them outside the context and present them in another form and there begins the ‘sound art’. BC: How did you start your career as a so-called sound artist? ZA: When I was in my dance company. Once, we invited a lot of sound designers and producer musicians to do sound for our piece. And, of course, in Morocco, there was no one like this. And it was all about the economy—it was very expensive to bring someone from France or Belgium. So I thought, yes I’m a musician, I have some

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experience and why can’t I give it some time and learn? I started to do some music with my laptop, and I discovered this huge possibility to do with sound—with just one tone you can do what you want. Then I began to learn about the sound; and once I was in a ceremony, a special ritual thing, and I had been to a ceremony like this before, but this one was special because I learned a lot of things about the energy of sound, the physics of sound, and how sound moves. So I was in this ceremony like an active body—not just receiving, but giving and receiving—and it was interesting because this special ritual is about therapy. It’s music therapy. And I was there thinking, ‘Wow, it’s really good. We have a big potential, why don’t we see this and present this ritual like a psychological science?’ Then I began researching about what sounds or frequencies have an impact on our body. And I began doing experiments about the body—ears and not just the ears, but to question sound with physical contact. Then I began doing experiments, be it at performances or just in my flat, and I discovered that they have a lot of potential because they give different levels of not just perception, they give the facility of reading a work. Because it’s just sound and audiences can have some identified sound, and they have another thing about energy and frequency and contact. That’s all. BC: Did you start your sound practice from recording sound? ZA: I did it automatically, because when I began doing a lot of research, I bought my first recorder, and for me, it was a possibility to catch some moments in my city. For example, because Casablanca has a variety of sounds, it sometimes has some surprises. I was like a crazy man recording everywhere. I don’t know why, but it was a feeling that maybe I can have some special moments and I have some special moments in Casablanca. From 2005, I spent eight years with my recorder; I have a full hard disk with a lot of recordings that I don’t use a lot of, but it was this operation. For me, it’s necessary to catch some moments and sometimes just to have feedback about what I do, because in the moment I sometimes find things interesting and when I hear it I realise, ‘Okay, it’s common, I cannot use this’. I developed this thing of recording also because once you begin like a specialist, you record less than before, but you are really precise because you have an idea about what you need to catch from the sound.

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BC: Did you use those recordings in your compositions? How do you do that? ZA: I’m an autodidact. I don’t learn to do music like an academic in what we can call an academic approach. For me, it’s just about feeling the necessity of putting this sound in this moment. They must have a connection about what I need to give to the audience. Maybe sometimes it’s just about feeling; it’s not about questioning philosophical things. At other times it’s about doing experiments with perception. I like to disturb the audience with different perceptions of having sound in the space. For me it’s interesting. Sometimes I used to do sound for dance pieces and it was a very difficult approach; it’s not easy. In the dance piece, you have a one-­ hour dance piece with a dramatic line and we must be very careful about how we can bring sound and not disturb the performance. They push me to be precise about what we need to hear from the stage. At the same time, I hate this idea of putting sound like a decoration and just having some structure to make things beautiful. For me, sound is not about giving a beautiful image. For me, the necessity of being in the space is about energy and reverberations and I began to speak these kinds of characteristics onto the stage. Sometimes they have just some electronic things, and at other times I put in some recordings and they transform a lot. At times it is about identity because I have used some sounds with a very special identity: if I put it in Morocco, all Moroccans will recognise it but when I put it on a European platform, it’s another level of being interested in the sound. And it’s a good exercise because you can manage to defend your work with Moroccans but with Europeans, it’s different. They begin to be exotic, and this is the beginning of problems. You have to defend your work and say, ‘I’m not in this kind of exoticism, but I represent an identity but I’m an artist’. I don’t care about my identity because I have it. I cannot put it outside. Sometimes you need to feel that people consider you as a normal human being having a view about things but because we come from a special area, they have a parallelism about our identity and artistry. BC: Like a Moroccan artist, an artist coming from Morocco, or this kind of identification. ZA: Yes, I begin to be careful about this question. What we present— should we present identity or artwork?

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BC: When you are identified as a Moroccan artist you will fall under a certain category in festivals for example. ZA: It’s not about this but all that you do. They focus on your identity and say, ‘Ah look, this art is coming from Morocco’. Sometimes we lose many things because we are focused on this question of identity and not about the meaning of the work, the practice. It’s problematic. It’s normal and this is our reality. BC: As someone who was born and raised in Casablanca, Morocco, how do you relate your practice to the traditional knowledge systems around sound and listening you’re associated with? ZA: How do I relate? It’s not automatic, but it can be because we grow up in these things and sometimes you have some focus on one point and you need just to share it on a different level. I can be an American having the same focus. This kind of question is not very easy to answer because I am not interested in presenting the Moroccan identity. For instance, if I have some European coming to Morocco working in a special thing, I cannot say, ‘Ah yes, how do you see yourself with your identity in this work?’ It has not happened because we have a colonial story and they have some layers of Western identities, even sometimes with a very good artist that I like, but the global narrative imposes these different layers. I don’t know how to explain it but it’s touchable. BC: You don’t like the idea of ‘tradition’ at all? ZA: The idea of tradition when it’s put in a folkloric way. When you present this tradition like a touristic thing, it’s dangerous. It’s the case all the time. I discovered that the Moroccan Ministry of Culture has some special artists that they bring to different parts of the world to represent Moroccan art, and it’s all about folklore— it’s about one fixed representation of Morocco. That’s why it’s very difficult to represent contemporary art in an official ministry, because for them we are aliens doing some bizarre things. It’s not what represents Morocco. At the same time, we are free artists, we move a lot and they don’t understand why we move. It’s a very special balance. BC: I’m also wondering whether it’s understood through the idea of deterritorialisation: an artist is deterritorialised from his or her traditions to becoming global or universal in a way. But even then, I think there are possibilities to have some sort of re-connection with

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where you’re coming from. Or you don’t want to at all associate yourself with your folkloric or traditional approach to art? ZA: We are artists and we need to be present in different things. We move a lot and for me, they have some work. If you want to be universal, you must do it in English. This is a new kind of identity you put in your work. It is like it’s a translation of your work. This approach is a little bit confusing because why can’t I do it in my language? Because it’s about the economy, it’s about the process of the art world, and it is like this. Sometimes I have discussions with artist friends and talk about why we must think in English, because it’s a very different layer. It’s like, yeah I can do it like this, but it will be very closed since I must put it on a global platform. This process causes problems before doing art. For example, how I perceive my art: can I perceive it like I want even after doing this work of translation and adaptation of open platforms, or do I need to think of it from the beginning as a global thing? Because in the MENA region, North Africa and the Mediterranean, we have a lot of funds giving money and sometimes you open the application and it’s clear that you must be a certain case and you are not free to do your art but you adapt. You must adapt your way of thinking about money. Sometimes I think if some of these projects are coming from a real need from the artist to do this project or if it’s just about economic gain, because we do need to work. BC: There are certain schools of thought and knowledge systems. For example, Indian classical music schools of thought with certain traditional and customary ideas about perspective, time and duration that hold the lineage. In Morocco, or in North Africa, there are also schools of thought, particular ways of listening, particular ways of producing art or perceiving art, particular ways of sound making, with different parameters, such as time/temporality, space/perspective, improvisation or collectivity and subjectivity. One can’t completely detach from these trajectories, can we? Do you think you can completely detach from the school of thoughts, from the cultural and sonic roots you were born with? ZA: Yes, it is possible but it’s about engagement. What is the kind of engagement that I am creating inside? It’s a decision; it’s a personal decision about the artist, it’s not about community because you will give your art to a big community but it must be clear before it begins from you and not in the process. The process must be an

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artistic process and not a conformism process. It’s about decisions like what I need to do now with my practice. Because I am in this thing, I am an artist, I do a lot of different things and sometimes I do technical things just for money because we need to live with what we do. But it’s clear for me that when I do this because I need to have money, I do it because I’m very close to the art process or that I do it like a technician, that’s all. And when you have your project, it’s another thing. It’s like changing your personality. You are not the same. You must adapt yourself to be in a different situation and must be clear each time about what you need to do as an artist and what you present. Who inspired you? Are there historical figures that inspire you? From whom do you draw ideas? I learned a lot of things about John Cage (and his colleagues), some smart ideas they put in a very special world. I saw some performances on the internet, and I began to discover a lot of performances they have, some of which I don’t remember. But I feel that they push me to have more interest in sound, sometimes I see something. Maybe I cannot like all of the performances but they have some moments where you stop and say, ‘Ah, it’s interesting what he’s doing here, maybe I can try it in another way about one personal experience’. I’m a very active audience. It’s like when you are in a market and you buy a different product and when you are in your house, what you do with this, I don’t know, but you take a lot of materials and don’t process the different things. You must find a new kind of processing to mix things and provoke something. For me it has been like this, and the travel. When I began to travel as a tourist or for different programs, it was usual to see what happens outside and discover, share, and meet people. For me, this is what inspires me. Do Moroccan artists, artists from the MENA region1 and the Middle East or African artists inspire you? I like one sound artist, Tarek Atoui, from Lebanon.2 I talked about Tarek Atoui in 2006/2007 when I saw some special work. Because I’m a dancer, I connect what he does with what I do. It’s like he’s

 MENA is an acronym referring to the Middle East and North Africa regions.  As introduced earlier, Tarek Atoui is a contemporary artist and composer from Lebanon, who is currently living and working in Paris. Based on research in music history and tradi1 2

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in trance, he’s in a second state. He is not a professional doing clean things, he is very disturbing, and this pushes you in a very special moment. I like him. I like one producer called Amon Tobin, but he’s not a sound artist. For a period of time, he was doing great work with recording sound and working like a ‘bruiteur’—people doing sound for cinema, but in a performative way. BC: Foley. ZA: But sometimes it’s just a moment about special artists. It’s not all about what he did, but I try to take just the one moment that I preserve as an artist and focus on them because sometimes you can have some deception about an artist when you see the evolution of producing art. When you are famous sometimes you lose some things. BC: But you don’t look for roots in your work? ZA: Yes. No, I don’t know, maybe. Because it is all about connection for me. When I decide to do some work in this bag, for example, it is not about this bag. It’s about a lot of things coming from my memory. They bring me to focus on this but it’s not this moment about me and the bag. Sometimes processing begins before in our memory. And it takes just a moment to decide to take time to write and to explore. When I work I like this freedom of having to manage my way to create. I don’t like to be very organised when I create, it makes me closed. I like to have an idea to question myself about and to say, ‘Yes, they (the projects) have some potential’, but I don’t need to do it now; I can do it maybe in five years. In these five years, maybe after two years, without deciding I begin to do it because it is about the feeling. For me it is art therapy—the way we do art is a self-therapy. BC: Do you think that your work is primarily a product of the European or Western connection with Morocco? Without Europe/France being in Morocco as colonisers there was no cultural confluence. Without this confluence, you would not exist. Or would you exist on your own? For example, recording technology came through European colonisers As did the idea of sound as an object. ZA: It’s an important thing coming to our works and hopefully that exists, but this question is another layer of a kind of colonisation. tional music practices, his work reflects the notion of instrument, and how it interacts with listening, composing and performing.

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Because of the evolution of science, today we have all of these products that have come from this evolution. This story of the evolution of science is really strange, it’s not precise. Sometimes we talk about Arab science beginning to create some special experience but for me, it’s a human process. It’s not territorial, it’s human. And I believe in humans. If I begin to think like this about who created this object, where are they coming from etc., sometimes you can get a little bit crazy about this idea and say, ‘Ah no I cannot use the recorder, I must work on it to breed it’. But there must have been some sound practices before colonisation happened. The golden era, for example; what is called the golden era in Morocco? How were pre-colonial practices with sound? They have a lot of sound practices which are not about recording but about putting sound in the universe. Physically for me, it’s a kind of recording. When I put a sound, the sound has no limits. It travels and maybe sometimes it meets some sound coming in from churches from 100 to 1000 years ago. They are with these sounds for me. They have no issues. When we put it in space, they stay with us. It’s a kind of recording but we must create a technology to recognise it. North African Gnawa or other situated alive sonic traditions also produce sound in a particular way with particular rhythms, sonorities, or temporalities. Are you not curious about them? This idea of therapy with sound for me is a high-level thinking about sound, but there has been no communication about this. There are just rituals and practices and they have no one to think about this thing. It is physical; I saw it in some moments in this ceremony: the difference between the levels of sound, the material used to produce the sound, is it a voice or just a bass instrument or metallic things or some drum with vibrations? For me, it is kind of an evolution of thinking through sound. It’s not just having time to produce music with what we have, but we create instruments. I think that they take a lot of processing to build something like this and to play music within Africa. At the same time, they have another country very far away, they produce something very similar and they don’t meet each other. It’s about human intelligence. When you work with folk musicians or the traditional musicians— for example, you said there are musicians and dancers—is your approach the same? What is your approach in specific?

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ZA: It’s very different. I told you that I’m changing myself in-between projects. For this project, it’s a very choreographic piece, and I have a short intervention in this performance because it’s a 50-minute performance. Maybe I have 10 minutes of putting/creating sounds specifically to keep in the dramaturgical line of this piece, and trying to have a connection with this music that I respect because I do a lot of research about it, but my intervention is like this. It’s a balance between audience, musician and dancer, and it’s very different when I do a sound performance. If I were an industrial musician, it would be very different. It will be about destruction of materials and trying to construct a different way and language of our music. Maybe I will do it in some other project, but for this present collaboration, sometimes I have this feeling like, ‘Ah maybe I need to explore this’, but it’s not the moment to do so because it’s a production that does not give time for us. Because if you decide to do personal work, then it’s very—I can’t find the word; I must look for the word because it’s important to me. Selfish! BC: Selfish? So what do you mean to say? That your approach is self-centred? ZA: No, when we decide to create something, we are selfish about the way we want to do the work. Sometimes there is this kind of wish that can come in a global project like this and you must raise the question, ‘yeah, yeah it’s good to think about this but this is not the moment’ and you must try to have a balance to decide where you decide to put yourself in an experimental way and where you cannot be experimental. BC: Can you completely erase your Moroccan identity in your sound work? ZA: I don’t think about it. If we begin to think about this, for me it begins to be a psychological problem. We don’t need to make this decision. For now, I’m Moroccan. It is more like I’m there, I want to do what I want to do and it’s okay. If you begin to think this way, it’s just perturbations. BC: When you draw in your ideas from choreography, your choreography also influences a lot of your sound work. Like you said in the beginning, you touch and produce sound through the body. What is your approach in sound practice? ZA: I develop an idea about a connection with tools, and I do that in a performative way. What performance art gives us is a freedom to

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the thing—you can use a different tool and it’s for me a good occasion to react and to present my perception about these two things. But I do it in a very experimental way with the audience, and at the same time sometimes I try to break this idea of the audience. I don’t like the idea of the audience as inactive. I like to break the code and bring hands-on experiments or sometimes I try just to have some special electric things and give them to the audience to play with and they produce sound. It’s our story, it’s not mine. For me, the performing arts give this platform. You have this freedom to create your personal platform and invite in the audience. You cannot do it in a choreographic piece because it has a dramatic line and story; it’s very difficult. But in this situation, you can work in the perception of the audience with sound and light. I also do light; I do some light design. Sometimes it’s very special to be in a different position. I think sometimes that I will just dance or do sound and do just this to be in a good situation financially. And I found today that I’m very lucky to be in this situation. We must work hard and learn a lot of things to develop our art. Now I’m okay with this. Before I had this thing like a lot of artists do and was crying every time, saying, ‘No one is helping us, we need money’. Then, I decided to do many other things and it is okay for me. You know today we have a lot of artists and when you hear them talking, it’s all about financial things. Yes, it’s important, but sometimes we need to hear them talk about art. So you are not at all interested in a historical discourse, you don’t want to reposition yourself within a historical trajectory, do you? Or you don’t? In which historical trajectory (there is a long history of this and that—there are different historical trajectories) do you like to position yourself? For example, the ‘folk artists’ that the cultural ministry shows everywhere, you don’t belong to that tradition. You don’t want to see yourself as part of that trajectory. Which trajectory do you associate with? I don’t think about it. If someone asks you ‘which trajectory or which traditional line of thinking do you belong to—African art or Arabic art, for example?’ I don’t know. It’s kind of a question that I see it like this—you cannot give yourself this identification but there are a lot of people. Not identification, but position. Position, yes.

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BC: There are different lines of history. We need to historicise ourselves sometimes, in the form of self-determination. Where do our ideas come from? Where does my practice come from? ZA: For me, it comes from social experience. BC: In terms of history? ZA: Performing arts in Morocco. BC: Can you tell a little bit about that? ZA: I think when I discovered this form of art, it was a form that gave you the possibility to be just what you are, to take from different knowledge that you have and try to create, present and share with the audience without caring about the artistic form. It’s just processing how I can manage myself to organise some ideas and research because there is this layer of performing arts and a lot of research and sharing in a very democratic way. It’s not about the artist and the audience, it’s the same layer and we are together. In Morocco, it works because when I decide to do it, I do it in a very chaotic way. Because in Morocco there are not a lot of institutions of art, it’s really a new blank page. And you begin to write this story about what we consider in our audience. Because for me it’s very important—I’m coming from a popular area, I discovered art and it gave me a lot of chances to discover, to push myself in a different experience, and when I began to work like an artist, it was good, it’s very good. And we have a lot of possibilities to go outside to Europe, the USA, the Middle East etc. When I come to Morocco, at one point I had this thing that yeah I’m an artist now but what do I do with my art inside my country? I began to ask this question and we may all begin to try to do something. It’s all about elitist programs. It’s in the centre of the city, Casablanca, that you have some galleries; you have maybe 100 or less of the population of Casablanca that has the possibility to discover art. For me, it’s bullshit so I try to have some really open experiences with simple audiences. It’s possible because people are discovering, and you can perturb them about the form, but they feel closer to the practice. I can do it. I’m not an artist and I don’t know what you do but I have something—they give me some ideas, okay! For me, if art cannot give this possibility with a large audience, it’s clearly bullshit, because it’s all about structure, institutions, people who have money and at some point you feel like you’re in a comfort zone. Like with art in a private castle with some private and some special

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people who turn their backs on what happened in their city, in their area. For me, it’s important that we must find some moments and share and give this possibility. When you talk of not being an elitist in your approach, being more ordinary, do you also consider that the European or Western influences which come through colonisation (and also through globalisation later on), also create elitist forms of artistic approaches? It’s automatic. It’s automatic. But you would like to resist that process of elitism in art which is a direct outcome of historical colonisation in Morocco? Yeah, for the first time in my head it’s not about resistance. When I began trying to do something, it’s just we have the possibility to be in a different layer and sometimes we must return to some layer because it can be a good experience and good inspiration, and afterwards, when you see this, you begin your resistance mindset because you understand that ‘yes I am okay with what I do, but maybe I lost a lot of things’. I had one experience in Casablanca, and I tried to go to a conference about culture and art, about different things, I recorded a lot of conferences and they gave me an idea to work on the emptiness. Then, I experimented once and it was really bizarre. I created a kind of conference and then I invited four speakers and I managed the conference, and with my record, I constructed a new form of discussion about art using some specialists of culture and art in Morocco. It was like, ‘Ah what did they do? They don’t like it?’ But for me, if we have this chance to experiment with something like this, then why not? It comes from consciousness, it’s not just a joke. Some people find that it’s good to react to voices between themselves but for me this is resistance; to have time and have the occasion and you give a mirror to your audience because my audience is elitist, it’s made up of a lot of specialists. Who were the speakers in your conference? The speakers are materials, not humans. There were four speakers and I managed some things with my hardware to give some sound to each speaker—I managed my conference with some buttons. I put forth a question like it was to an object because they were objects! And they answered me, and another speaker was reacting, it was like this. For me, this kind of subversion is necessary to be done from time to time, to be in this way, because when we do art

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we decide to be in very paradisiac things, like a heaven—the world of artists, a lot of meetings, hotels, parties etc. This is just a part of art but now they have begun being more interesting than art itself. All these museums where they organise the parties, what we eat there, it’s all elitist. The necessity of doing art today is confused. I don’t like it. BC: Is this your resistance? ZA: Yes. BC: Does this resistance have something to do with the resistance practised in Morocco against colonial atrocities? ZA: It’s related, it comes from time to time in a different situation. It’s not a precise moment when you decide to do it but sometimes you feel yourself in some special context and you say, ‘No I feel myself like an object and I cannot deal with this, I must react’. And my reaction is doing art, reacting and doing both at the same time. BC: I think I took a lot of your time but it was much pleasure to talk with you. We can stop on this note. Anything you would like to add? ZA: A question—why do you record a meeting like this? BC: Record? I would like to transcribe it for the research. I’ll be gathering interviews and transcribing them from audio to text (I’ll send you a copy, of course, and then I will closely read it from my research perspective. Every time I make an argument, those interviews are the empirical material to either support or negate my ideas. That is the reason: to keep a documentation of all the interviews.

CHAPTER 26

Jatin Vidyarthi

This conversation occurred on Zoom in one autumn evening of 2020. Jatin, who I met in person previously in Bangalore in 2010 and had since been in touch with, responded to my inquisitive questions with élan. I could hear Bangalore street sounds and busy traffic faintly in the pauses of our conversation. BC: To begin with, I would like to ask you about your background and how you came to work with sound and experimental music. How did that happen? JV: I started off as a sound engineer. I did the audio engineering course in Australia then I came back and was an audio engineer in Bombay for a while. I started making music, doing music production. I also started making music with the computer at that point of time and started to DJ too. Then after about three years, I completely left the audio engineering scene and concentrated on music production and DJ-ing. This was around 1997 or 1998; back then I was into electronic music and a lot of ambient music which was happening in the 90s. I was into a lot of classical music as well, a lot of Steve

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Jatin Vidyarthi—JV. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_26

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Reich, John Cage, and Takemitsu.1 Back then I was a lot into Takemitsu. I started making ambient music at that time and I started recording. By 2001, I got more involved in sound art; I was recording all the time, working with synthesisers, with found sounds, and with recorded sound from tapes and vinyls and things like that—basically all kinds of sounds, old and new. That’s a bit of my history. I would say, since then I have been working as a music producer and a sound artist so I have a bit of both in me. I like to play around with both these things and try to find work, which involves these things—like films, new media, stuff like that. BC: It seems that your inspirations were the pioneers of sound art and experimental music from the West. JV: Yes. BC: Did you have any influence from the Indian or South Asian side of sound and musical practices? JV: Well, I think on the Indian side there were many experimental films/short films done in NFDC in the 70s and 80s, which had a lot of these soundtracks. I had been influenced a lot by them. Films like Kamal Swarup’s Om Dar Ba Dar, which is a cult Indian film.2 I would say I got more influenced by the soundtracks rather than the people behind the production. I don’t think that there were many of them back then. It’s just now that Mallika Sarabhai’s initiative came up, as did David Tudor’s project, which nobody knew about.3 But I think I was more influenced by the soundtracks, Indian films soundtrack or experimental films, things like that. I think that there were a lot of experimental musicians back then. Well, maybe not a lot but just a few. There were musicians who were working with filmmakers and stuff like that. So yes I think it’s more of those guys, more of the experimental filmmakers. Well, if you think about Indian artists, sound artists and musicians then, of course, there is Disco. Disco to a raga beat which was a big influence from the electronic side. 10 Raagas to a Disco beat was a big  Tōru Takemitsu was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory.  Om Dar-B-Dar (1988) is an Indian path-breaking experimental film directed by Kamal Swaroop. 3  Indian-origin Britain-based musician Paul Purgas recently unearthed this little known history of the connections between Sarabhai family, David Tudor, and the birth of early Electronic Music in India: https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/electronicindia-moog-interview-paul-purgas 1 2

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album made in the 80s by an Indian, which was again an independent album.4 So it’s on and off that the Indian stuff keeps coming up. You get to hear some old stuff (music), which at times is independent too. At times you get to hear some Goan music, core music which is totally crazy and lovely. But not many sound artists as such for inspiration. Classical music had been a prime influence for me. Such as? I used to hear a lot of Dhrupad, Malikarjun Mansur and Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. I loved the tracks, which had lot of alaap in it. At the time when I was making music and playing electronic music, we had of group in Bombay, which was quite nice. It was a bit of intellectual group and we used to listen to cool electronic music, and talk about films, Indian music, Indian films, and all contemporary things. Back then I used to listen to lot of classical music, which was very nice. We used to meet at a friend’s house and listen to artists like Bahauddin Dagar on the Rudraveena, and we would have a party around him!5 (laughter) Those music sessions were a lot of fun. And then, of course, using this music can be so nice within the realm of sound. Those were my Indian influences; Western influences were also there, so both were there all the time, both were strong. I listen to a lot of music. In terms of sonic canon, there is Western canon as well as Indian canon, like court music or folk forms and folkloric music or storytelling. There are so many regional and local musics in India. Yes, yes. Actually, Rajasthani music can get very experimental. Yes, exactly. Yes, I love that music. Their percussion is something else. It can go completely crazy. And the string instrument—the use of string particularly in Rajasthani music. And also in tribal music—for example, Santhali music—there are percussion sounds, but with psychedelic effect. Yes, yes.

4  Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat(1982) is an album produced by Charanjit Singh released by HMV, India. 5  Hailing from the Dagar Family, the leading proponent of Dhrupad, Mohi Baha’ud-din Dagar is an exponent of the Rudraveena, which is an ancient classical musical instrument of India.

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BC: These are the Indian canons in the folk sounds idiom and the court music idiom; in between there are kind of hybrid forms such as Indian film soundtrack. But I am curious as you mentioned that it’s possible to use them in new kinds of sound art work. I would like to ask you how you imagine incorporating the Indian canon in the work you do. JV: I like to make my sound quite evocative. I like to gather new and exotic timbres and tones. I can sample Indian sounds and do that using the sampler and the DAW. It is just to get new exotic tones which I find very useful. Actually, I love anything which is Indian. Even if it is just a voice, I can do so much to it—I can put it into a dance track or in an ambient track or even make a whole sound piece around it. It can be just a nice voice of a railway hawker or something like that, which I often record. I am recording all the time, I love recording, and I love listening to my recordings as well especially when they take me to a certain place and time. I am also always building stuff around the things I record; I use that as a base and most of the time those recordings are Indian. I go into scenarios either noisy or quiet but they are mostly in India. I keep that as a base where I can start off things. BC: Like bootleg recordings? JV: Yeah, if I go to Goa for a holiday, I’ll record in the morning. I have now become a bit disciplined about that. Even if I am partying too much, on at least one or two days I’ll make it a point to wake up at 7:00 AM in the morning and get the sounds that I want. Then I’ll also go in the evening and record at least for 10 or 15 minutes. It can be Airports or whatever; I can sit and record quite a bit, wherever I am with a small recorder. BC: And then? JV: Then I tweak it to high glory. But I retain some Indian-ness in it for sure. Because, if you tweak a Western sound you get some kind of a Western thing happening. If you take an Indian sound: say, for example, I take a vinyl or a really old Tamil vinyl, I can record a bit of that. It could be old film songs or it could be some old classical music which I would use. I can take little bits and pieces from it or totally tweak the entire thing and turn it into something else which can be a bit more Psycho-acoustical; more to work with the brain, the subconscious and things like that. So, Indian stuff is great. I am always working with Indian recordings and Indian sounds. Even in

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the dance music scene or electronic music scene, it’s better to have more of an Indian approach compared to making House and Techno music of the kind that is coming out of the West. Everybody is doing that anyway. It’s very boring for me to see a lot of Indians getting into Techno music, which is kind of a German thing—there are anyway millions of people making that music. I use Indian flavours a lot; classical I would say I use quite a lot. BC: Structurally speaking, how do you like to use the Indian flavour as you mentioned? And in your opinion, what does that flavour consist of? JV: The thing is, structurally speaking I can do anything I want. I don’t have a structure as such. I don’t work within structures. It could just be a sound with a little bit of reverb and delay that can take me to a different planet altogether and from that I can work more. I love reverb, I love delay and I can just trip on that for the whole day and still produce something nice. Then I can sit with the synthesiser and work on a nice tone, which can float in and out with the previously produced sounds. Basic stuff, you know. After that a nice sine wave for the base or something. I don’t like very flat sound art music. I like it to be a little more emotional with a little more strings here and there, you know. It is like something musical happening. So when it comes to my sound compositions there is no structure as such. It is more of a collage of things. I can have a lot of things going on like loops, for example, and then I build effects over these things—sometimes taking them out or bringing them in into the tracks, at times stopping them to play certain things. I can just play around with a lot of sound by turning them on and off. I do the same with effects. There are small loops as well as large loops. These things make it quite interesting for me when I play. I have my material in the computer and then I just play around with them and start building different soundscapes. That is how I have been doing it as of now. And as for the Indian thing, it depends from project to project. If it does require a structure, I can work around a structure. In India there is not much of a scene; therefore, you work in different projects. They are different jobs in a way and then it changes from there. But there is no structure as such; I don’t like structure so much. Though a little bit is good, that’s for sure. A little bit is good but then again it brings in the musicality of things. When you want to bring out the musicality of things then

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you have to work on a bit of structure and you have to think a little more about the chords—which chord goes where or which chord follows. So in that way, it’s quite loose. It depends on the project or what I am working on. BC: But when it comes to Indian traditional sound, such as the influence of Dhrupad, there are certain characteristics in Dhrupad, be it vocal or instrumental like Rudraveena. The alaap is for a longer and free time, with the architecture of sound getting built. It’s a very natural and subjective approach to listening and sound practice, which is somehow missing in a Western canon where there is a strong structural approach to the sound-making. There is a score and you follow the score. But here in Indian practice or sonic tradition if we call it that, it’s never fixed but changing; there is a continuous emergence. When you are drawing your ideas from the Indian tradition, do you follow this idea of very personal subjective association with sound? We can talk about some elements like time, perspective and then improvisations or attention—these are the parameters in which it is possible to understand the Indian canon of sound. JV: So what would the question be? BC: For example, when you use delay, reverb or time-stretching, do you like to draw your idea from an alaap? JV: Yes, sure. It has to become quite a meditative thing for me immediately—both for the listener and for me. It has to take you immediately into a space of deep contemplation and it has to have that meditative quality which classical music has. Even if I am working with water mixed with a bit of dhrupadalaap, it immediately takes you into a very meditative state, which I like to build around my music. A ‘letting go’ when you want to lie down with your eyes closed and just listen to it. BC: But then the idea of experimental music and electronic music often comes from a Western understanding of sound such as the basic techno music or industrial. There is a lineage. JV: Yes, there is a culture, a big culture of electronic sound. But I also find it very interesting that the Western artists after a point got into the Indian culture. For example, Terry Riley had a huge influence on me. I realised that in Western music, you could work within a given perimeter (of notes) whereas in the Indian form you can go into the mid notes and do all kinds of various little tricks. I think

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they were all connected in a way. La Monte Young along with other artists came to India and they all got into this cosmic Indian thing that was happening. I feel it just happened more there in the West. Electronic music, vinyls or things like that have more of a culture in the West—it’s been going on for a long time out there. BC: How do you like to join these two worlds together, East and West? The traces of these historical differences are built in our psyche and subconscious ways of listening even today! JV: That’s what I usually do; I don’t find it very difficult. I think there is something there that can mix quite easily. If you get a drone going it already fills up the track and then you mix the classical stuff, which takes you into a meditative space. So that is the thing— I do not find it difficult. Even when you are mixing with beats in electronic music, I find that it is very easy and it goes so beautifully, sometimes. Indian vocal beats can go so well, or a little sample of an Indian instrument blends so well with electronic music. The way Indian music can be used for quite a few things can give you goose bumps and I am always doing that. I am always doing the Western thing that influences me a lot and then I am trying to push in some Indian thing inside which gives me a bit of Indian flavour. I don’t find it very difficult to bridge the two. It works very well for me. BC: Do you like to call it ‘fusion’? I mean ‘fusion music’ was a term coined in the early 80s or late 70s. JV: Yes, you can’t call it fusion but it is something, which dwells at the outer reach of fusion. It is not like a drum playing or the tabla playing or for that matter the sitar. It could be something from the outer reaches of fusion music—ambient music and something like that. I think my music is a bit of psychoacoustic music. I like to get my music under people’s skin; I think I can do that with music. With visuals you can succeed a certain amount but with sound, you can really get into their psyche, into their brain. I like playing around with things like memory or a film soundtrack. So I can get into a kind of psychoacoustic space quite fast, which brings memories and such things to the listener; it makes it a bit deep. It could be dark sometimes, it could be happy or it could be a bit light too. It depends again on the project which I am doing. BC: Is it like these psychoacoustic elements are drawn from the meditative and contemplative listening? JV: Yes, something like that. From my memory, yes.

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BC: There are different moods. For example, some ragas are mood-­ based. There are darker ragas which also exist like the noble raag Darbari or darker/moody raag Malkauns, for that matter. JV: Some are dark, some are up. For me, it varies from sample to sample. If I hear something nice and I feel like something can be taken and used in some way, then it immediately strikes me. I have also done quite a few classical projects like sound scores for films and things like that. Again these are not fully classical, I would call it more of an experimental classical where I have experimented with classical sound and used different ragas for different moods. There is just so much you can do with Indian music. It’s an ocean of wealth when it comes to sound or even electronic music. It just goes so well together. In fact, I was shocked the first time I did it. I just put a drum and base beat over some Indian stuff and it just locked immediately. M.S.  Subbulakshmi and others (laughs)! It’s superb; her voice is so tonal that it’s like a sharp tone when she reaches those high notes. BC: Like a viola? JV: Yes, yes, like a viola for sure. Another great singer is M. Balamuralikrishna. They are more tonal singers. Dark is something that I like and I can do but I actually want to be a bit more romantic and a little more creative in something that evokes a nice feeling—something that deals with beauty. If you listen to some of Rajan and Sajan Mishra, if you listen to their Benarasi-styled Khayal and Dhrupad, you will find that they are a bit lighter and it can be a little more beautiful at times, especially certain phrases. They are into beauty and the romantic thing a bit. BC: One thing I am very interested about is microtone/microtonality and Shruti. We know there are usually 12 tones in the conventional Western tuning system. I am talking about those microtones, which are in between the tones—Shrutis in Indian system. Do you make use of them in a way or are you aware of them? JV: Well the microtones are there in the Hindustani classical music, which is why most of the classical guys came to India to study it. I don’t use it so much because I am not a composer. I like to play around with different sounds and make something, but I must say I am not that much into microtones. I usually just play the synthesiser; I play some chords or I can sample something and play it on the synthesiser and play notes on it. I guess once you put into a lot

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of reverb and delay, the microtones start happening. And you know, something happens when you put the effects in. How do you use your microtonal approach? I think you are quite microtonal in your approach from what I have heard from your sound. BC: I work with time, temporality. I expose one particular tone for a long time, very similar to the Drone. For example, in Dhrupad, there is a drone element to it which suggests it is continuously present under the voice. JV: Tanpura.6 BC: Yes, Tanpura. I am greatly influenced by Tanpura and its temporally expanded drone. It is like you give attention to a particular tone for a longer time and you will have a better interaction with its microtonal elements. Through these longish encounters, some microtonal elements expose themselves. JV: Yes, okay. BC: I was wondering about another question. When we think about raga, Hindustani classical music is strongly ingrained in nature. In the sense that it is improvisational, it’s not score-based and it is performed in natural spatiality as a natural phenomenon. That is, for the morning time, there is a specific raga, in the afternoon there is a raga and in the evening there is a raga. So when it comes to using technologies like synthesiser or recording machine, which can take a sound and make it beyond nature, how do you address this problem? JV: For me, the thing is that I appreciate the music and there are a lot of purists who do not like to sample Indian music and say it goes against norms, one should not be doing this, etc. Yet I can do it quite easily. I can take it out of its natural habitat and build something new for it. It’s more of a Hip Hop sampling mentality. The Hip Hop guys take various things from various places and build something completely new out of it. It’s a beautiful art form. They make beauty out of different things, but you really don’t know where it is coming from because it is so well hidden. Entire albums are made from records by just sampling. I do love enjoying classical music on its own, listening to it. I have a great classical music friend 6  Tanpura is a long-necked plucked string instrument, originating from India. It does not play the primary melodic lines but rather supports and sustains the melody of another instrument or singer by providing a continuous harmonic drone.

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who is in Chennai who has a lot of classical stuff from all over the place. He keeps giving me recordings, so I keep listening to amazing stuffs from him. All the Tamil stuff you know, which are really good. I can do it quite easily, these sampling things. For me, it’s more about building space. For me, it’s about space and new exotic tonal qualities that I can get. I can take a sound just from a two-­ second little snippet and build something around that. Well, I must say I am not so much of a purist. BC: Do you think purists have some inherent problems in themselves? JV: I don’t know. I think there is an arch that is made, and there is an arch on its own which you can use. And there is a great quality that you can get from doing this kind of sampling. The purists are okay; I can be friends with them for sure. They would have just that kind of a view. They would say, ‘We do not like a sarod being taken off. We don’t like a sarod sample being used over an electronic drum and base track’. They would say, ‘Get the sarod player for playing’. They will say that but I think it is pretty okay both ways for me. Either you get the sarod guy to play it or you sample the sarod guy. I think if the track does very well and you are making a lot of money from it then you definitely can pay the sample people that you brought in. But when it comes to Indian stuff where everything is in such a mess, you know what I mean. Indian classical music is old, Indian film music is old and, you don’t know where the copyright lies. Basically, copyrights are all gone; these companies have all vanished. You buy an old vinyl somewhere from a shop and it’s very difficult to get to these labels which have all vanished. It is definitely something that has been happening a lot in the last 20 years within sampling, film score music and using a lot of things. You can do anything you want with the new DAW—the future is in your hands. This is what I think most of the time. This is what John Cage and all were thinking was going to happen, and now we are sitting with everything at our fingertip, and yet we are quite sad. Moreover, technology has enveloped us so now we can’t do without the phone or we can’t do without the internet. We would sit with the internet for five hours rather than going out and meeting somebody on a Friday night. But when it comes to music and sound, I think we have a magical time during these moments. There is so much you can do. It’s fun to do it; you just have to put in the hours now. You have to put in the work. Everything is there

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set up for you—your synth, your computer or whatever else. You have to put in the hours and believe in what you do and work accordingly. I could just sit the whole day making soundscapes for 365 days a year. I get up in the morning and start working on some sound. I work at least four or five  hours a day. I have got some material in my DAW; I have got some synth sounds that I have recorded and then I just have to play with them irrespective of the effects. I try to get away from clichés; this is what I try to do and I try not to fall into clichés. And just keep it like that. BC: When it comes to identification: for example, you are performing a lot in India but if you go abroad you are termed as an ‘Indian artist’ or ‘Indian sound artist’. Does it feel problematic for you? JV: No, no, I love it. Because there are not many Indian sound artists, when I go abroad to play, for example, in Germany, they love it. I went two or three times to play my sounds there. In Germany and France, they love the Indian stuff and they love anything experimental. The British, they just love it. I don’t feel too weird playing it for them. They like to be presented with Indian flavours more than something, which is from their world. Of course, when I go abroad to play I always take their country into context. Suppose I am playing in Germany, then I’ll have sounds of the Berlin Wall protest or something like that and perhaps play some Wagner which is totally twisted and screwed up in the background. I use their musical tools and sound too and they immediately get used to it and like it. It can be a train in Germany or whatever and just playing around with that. But then I can also move to the Asian context and build sound around things from Asia and India. I think when I play abroad I mostly have their context in mind and then I try to build around that unless they have a specific Indian focus. Well I have played in Manchester around an Indian train—the first locomotive train, which was built in India by the British and operated between India and Pakistan. So they wanted to do a sound piece around that locomotive steam engine. At that time I got a lot of Indian things happening. But it depends; I can throw in quite a few things. If I go abroad I usually keep it within their context—I try my best to keep it within their context. And, of course, if it’s the electronic music scene I try to keep it Indian. I think I am a German; I love Germans and they love my music. They are so into music; music and sound is in their blood. They are really serious about

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good sound and even the British are for that matter. We don’t have a great sound culture here in India in terms of awareness about good speakers and everything. It is slowly improving for sure, but still we don’t have that. BC: What you called ‘sound culture’ is a European import: loudspeakers, microphones and recording equipment and studio techniques. These are the things that came to India during the colonial era. Before that there was a thousand years of local sound culture of folk music instruments, natural sounds, voice and performance like Dhrupad which are in the South Asian ways of listening. Then there are various kinds of pre-modern sound objects like ghungroo and temple bells.7 When you call it ‘sound culture’, consider that microphones and loudspeakers were cultural artefacts, which were imported. JV: Why do you think sound art or sound in general hasn’t flourished in India? It is because there is so much ear candy for you. It’s not like a quiet Western place. It’s the same with films or photographs. India is so vibrant you just have to stick a camera and half the work is done. Why do you think sound art and things like that hasn’t? I think it will. I don’t know. Why do you think there has been nothing at all? BC: If you go through sound art history, it was born out of an avant-­ garde tradition. It happened in American avant-garde, in European avant-garde, Fluxus, minimalism and happenings during the 60s. JV: Right. BC: Performance and media art. There were lot of avant-garde experimentations happening and through that sound art emerged; through sound, poetry, recorded sound, montage and collage of Pierre Schaeffer. JV: Yes. BC: I am curious to know if you think that there is a culture of avant-­ garde practices in India or there is no avant-garde as such. JV: There are a very few. There are a few filmmakers but it’s only starting now. In the last 15 to 20 years there have been some fi ­ lmmakers, 7  An on-going project titled Dhvāni(2020–2021) explores such pre-modern sound objects in the contemporary automation contexts. More information is available on the Rewire Festival website: https://www.rewirefestival.nl/artist/budhaditya-chattopadhyay and on Sonic Field website: http://sonicfield.org/dhvani/

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some festivals—smaller festivals—which are doing sound art and also doing experimental films. It is happening slowly but it is in the baby stages out here. It’s very much in the baby stages where there are few things and not much funds. I guess the West has more funds so they fund their artists well and they take care of their artists a bit better than here. Out here we find it a bit difficult with the corporate structures and things like that, which are very heavy. But there are people here; you know them, Navin Thomas. There is this shy person who makes experimental films. There are some filmmakers in Bombay now. So it’s become a bit of a scene now where they have these little cult followings of the avant-garde people and they are making a bit of a splash for sure. So the avant-garde scene in India is pretty late and has had kind of a belated emergence, right? It’s pretty late but it is catching up now. It’s getting quite good, the grants and residencies are getting much more competitive. So there are many kids and people coming in doing more interesting work. It is still developing; there are just one or two granting Institutions here. If you compare this with America or Japan, there is just one institution in India. How do you work in the Netherlands as an Indian artist? Are you an Indian artist or did you get citizenship from another country? I am identified as an Indian artist. I have not applied for a citizenship in Europe—I won’t. I survive mostly through academic work like writing, research, conducting workshops, giving talks here and there, doing certain projects and curatorial work—research primarily. But as an artist, it is very difficult. Until and unless you have citizenship of a particular country, you don’t have access to state funding. Exactly, that’s what I was asking. Then again Canada is very good with funding, very generous with their funding. Lot of Indian filmmakers go there and get lots of funding. It is difficult but I do like it, you know—some academic work, you teach a bit, do some soundtrack work for film, or whatever you know. Do you get to see a lot of gigs in Europe? Yes, I definitely try to attend exhibitions and performances. There must be a lot going on. Yes, lot’s going on here in The Hague. It’s one of the dense areas for sound practitioners because in the Netherlands, there are

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­ edicated sound schools such as Sonology.8 Many of the students d come out and they stay in the city. There are sound artists at every street corner out there. JV: They have become like the DJs now. Yes, everyone is a sound artist now. That must be really nice. There must be a vibrant scene with a lots going on. BC: Yes. JV: That must be nice. I am going to Berlin hopefully in March or April. There are many smaller places with tape culture. Berlin is also quite happening for sure, especially when it comes to sound. I am interested in staying for about a month or two and checking out the scene. BC: I just have one last question to wrap this session up and that’s about audience engagement. For example, the relationship with audience is different in different cultural contexts. In India, there is an unspoken relationship between audience and the performer. In Middle Eastern music, there is a direct relationship—without the presence of the audience the music will not happen. It’s a kind of dialogue between the audience and the musician or sound practitioners. In the West, there is a complete disjuncture; there is no direct confrontation with the audience. The audience comes and the music is performed through a score and there is a wall in between. How do you like to engage with the audience? JV: Well as I was saying, I like to put the audience into a meditative state. Actually, I like the audience to be more academic. I like more academic people to be there so they can at least understand what is happening. But I have also found that in certain places there are very open people. It depends on where you are playing and what kind of audience is going to come there. If the audience is already comprised of artists then they will get the music more for sure. So I do prefer more artists and academicians as audiences. In India, it’s still very small, there are small scenes. If you want to do a sound art gig or a performance out here you have to do it with the Goethe Institute where you will have to use their audience and their audience already knows a bit of what is happening. Or you will have to do it with the Alliance Francaise where they already have a clue as to what is happening and already have a list of people who are quite 8

 See: http://sonology.org/

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serious. You will get your 100 or 150 people. If you want to do it randomly then it becomes very difficult. I mean if you want to do it on your own then it becomes very difficult to do it out here. When I go to the West, I find the audiences to be more academic; they are more serious and they know what is happening. They know Steve Reich and John (Cage). Of course, they know it all, as it comes from there. They seem more receptive to me in a lot of ways. They seem more into it, in the West. I always have a great time in the West in Germany, in France or even in America. They seem to respect their artists and sound artists much better than they do here. I get awestruck encountering all this fuss about me! Do you like to entertain your audience? No, I do not like. My music is not an entertaining one. It’s not entertainment; it’s about space and place. You know it doesn’t have to be a score or anything; it can just be about a mood and a place, and the space. It’s more about moods and things like that—getting into a person’s mood, memory and things like that. I like it to be a little more contemplative. It is not engineered music at all; it is actually the opposite of that. But I do find sound art challenging in that way when you make it interesting. How do you make these sounds interesting to the listeners for a long period of time and how do you keep him engaged to your sound and make him like your sound in some way? So I tend to look at that process of how to make it more interesting for myself in a certain way by adding layers or whatever it is. I guess the trick in sound or sound art is to keep it going for a long time and keep it interesting. It could be anything: it could be a voice saying something, it could be a recording, but the ability to keep it interesting comes with the experience. It’s not very entertaining for sure. Did you strive for universalism? Let’s say, you don’t want to become part of a tradition, like the so-called Indian tradition or the Western tradition. Will you strive for a kind of universalism? No, I don’t know whether it’s universalism but rather ‘outsiderism’. Okay. What do you mean by that? As you said I am neither here nor am I there. I am neither doing any big time music productions with film music or whatever. So it’s like being an outsider for most of the things. I am just sitting inside my own bubble doing whatever I am doing and trying to get some

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work and projects through that. There is definitely a universalism thing happening. It’s definitely a universal acceptance and openness that I want when they hear my music—to open their brains. I guess meditation comes from that—accepting the universe and going with the flow in some way. Centring is important in my music; I like to be centred just like I am during meditation. So it’s universal and at the same time very organic. I like working with sounds of nature. I guess it’s a universal thing for sure, universal/outsider. But it’s a very small thing here in India; there are very few people who do this. It’s also slowly coming up now. And most of the people here are very interesting like Hemant and Naveen and all these guys. They are good friends and they are really cool chaps to hang out with. Even they are experimenting, you know? It is a fresh experience here in India. Compared to the West, I think you are a bit constrained. ‘Okay this person just does sound art, drum and base guy just does drum and base’. In India, it’s a bit of mishmash. If you don’t know what to expect, you know there is a bit of a chance element, which is what I like about India. You really don’t know what to expect from the audience. In the West, you are more used to having the academicians around especially if you are doing sound art and, of course, they are more interested. Here you might get some partying guy who really likes it. So definitely universal, international are the things I want to go for. If you want to do sound art in India, it is difficult. You need to go international, you need to get some support from the West/Europe or else you will die here if you want to be a sound artist. It is very difficult.

CHAPTER 27

Surabhi Saraf

This email conversation was developed around the same time our exchanges were unfolding while working together for the ‘Anthology of Exploratory Music from India’ (2021),1 which I curated, and ‘The Listening Biennial’ (2021),2 which I co-curated. These exchanges started, however, earlier in 2017, when I embarked on this compilation of exploratory music and sound works from India and a related exhibition, but the project took time to materialise. BC: How did you come to work with sound art and experimental music? Please provide a personal background. SS: I got into sound art and experimental music through the ways of visual art. After finishing my undergraduation in painting, I was working on a video installation project with the intention of creating an original composition for the sound, and a friend of mine introduced me to the work of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis and others in the process. This was a really exciting time for me, as that Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Surabhi Saraf—SS. 1  Listen: https://unexplainedsoundsgroup.bandcamp.com/album/anthology-of-exploratorymusic-from-india 2  More information can be found on the biennial website: https://listeningbiennial.net/

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_27

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is when I first learned that I didn’t have to know how to play an instrument to be able to create music. I always knew that I wanted to create my own sound but didn’t think I could do it with just my singing skills. I grew up learning Hindustani Classical vocals until I was in high school but then dropped it for art school. After moving to Chicago I got deeper into experimenting with different sound production techniques and using my singing voice as an instrument, and have continued performing and composing sound for most of my video installations while also occasionally collaborating with other artists. BC: What were the specific triggers for your interest in working with sound? SS: In my opinion, a sonic experience has the capacity to create affect and access the subconscious like no other medium. My broader arts practice has always been quite interdisciplinary and has included video production, music composing and performance, collaborative research, activism and more. However, if there is one medium that gets to the core of what motivates me and feels like my true calling, it has to be sound; I live for a profoundly moving and soulful sound experience. BC: Who are the inspirations for your work with sound? Is there anyone from India? SS: Inspirations for my sound work are always changing depending on where and what part of my practice and life I am in. Most recently an artist I have been deeply inspired by is Colin Self.3 Other artists who inspired my sound art practice early on were Pamela Z and Laetitia Sonami.4 During the pandemic I also found myself wanting to listen to Brian Eno and William Basinski’s work again after a long time. Over the past few years, I have grown a bit disconnected from the sound art scene in India. However, one place where I have consistently found inspiration is in the many many fantastic Sufi musicians I often listen to through Coke Studio Pakistan.5 ­Listening to Sufi music reminds me that experimental music doesn’t have to  Colin Self’s artistic practice spans performance, choreography, sculpture and music.  Pamela Z is a composer, performer and media artist working with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. Laetitia Sonami is a French-born US-based sound artist, performer and composer of interactive electronic music. 5  Coke Studio is a Pakistani television programme and international music event series that features live studio-recorded music performances by established and emerging artists. 3 4

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be void of emotionality and there is still power and value in wanting to achieve that soulfulness in some form no matter how abstract or weird my compositions may be. How is the broader field of sound culture in India different from the European/Western canon of sound in your opinion? Well, I am not sure how to answer this since I don’t think of Indian and Western sound cultures to be monoliths. There are so many different ‘scenes’ or sound cultures that I can think of which all follow their canons and are constantly evolving and changing. For example, the experimental sound art scene both in Indian and in the Western contexts are all about breaking canons and rules and seem quite similar at a fundamental level. But if you look at the underground music scene or classical music etc., it’s a whole different story. What do you think of as ‘canons’ of sonic thinking and perspective in the Indian context? What are the traditional sounds in your opinion? If by Indian context you mean Indian classical music and how it permeates through many other forms, I naturally think of tonality (including micro-tonality) and a dynamic rhythmic structure often using more traditional instruments like sarod, sitar, shruti box, tabla etc. Do you locate certain tendencies in your own work that draw ideas from the Indian canon or traditional sound culture in India? Are there any? My Indian roots and sensibilities definitely influence my work. I often use the alaap or long tones as a central motif in my compositions and I build a dynamic and textural sound space around it. However, I am never really trying to create a traditional sound or holding it as a benchmark, at least not consciously. How do you conceptualise the idea of time (duration and temporality) in your work? Slowing down to the pace of nature and the emotional body to gain a deeper understanding of the world within and outside us is at the core of my practice. I consider this slowing down as a form of resistance and practice of unlearning time defined by modern capitalism. How do you conceptualise the idea of space (aural perspective and depth of field) in your work?

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I explore space from the perspective of scale, finding the body’s position in the systems it resides in. Compositionally I use the idea of space as a tool for immersion, often thinking about the inner psychological space. How do you conceptualise the idea of improvisation in your work? Improvisation in a collaborative context for me always begins with attentive listening and is really about conversations and thinking about how to create a space for everyone involved to be and breathe together. I bring the same kind of embodied presence in my sound work by setting up systems and structures within which sonic ideas can flourish. How do you conceptualise the idea of attention in your work? I think of attention as our most precious resource. One of my favourite writers, Adrienne Maree Brown talks about this idea of ‘attention liberation’ as a tool for shaping change.6 I see this as inherently connected to the body, as who and what controls our attention and owns our bodies. So in my practice, I am extremely mindful of not only what I am paying attention to in the process but also what I want to bring attention to. In that respect, I like to use ‘attention liberation’ as a decolonising practice to build alternative narratives that aim to de-centre dominant ideologies that ground techno-capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy in our cultures. Do you think there is a confluence of cultures, between East and West, and between the Global North and Global South in your work? How do you identify yourself? I think the confluence of cultures in my work is consequential. My diasporic situated-ness in the American context is something that flows more intuitively through my work as opposed to a conscious effort to identify with the identity shaped by that intersection. What is your comment on Western/European colonisation of India and its historical effect on the sonic culture? How do you like to decolonise sounds in your own work? For me, a decolonial practice is about creating a sonic language outside of any specific culture and genre. This practice builds upon the constant work of recognising who owns my attention and

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­ rienting from what is true for me at the moment, and not just o what’s new; I can then create from that liberated place in me. BC: How do you engage with the audience? Do you like to entertain them? SS: I like to orient myself from a place of finding connection and to create a space for healing for my audience rather than entertaining. BC: The idea of ‘sound art’ departs from a typical Western musical tradition where tonal structures are discreet and quantifiable; how do you interpret the Indian system of micro-tonality that is ‘immeasurable’ and that is ‘unknowable’, hidden between microtones? Do these ideas and other Indian sonic aspects reflect in your work? SS: These ideas probably reflect in my work; however, this interpretation is not part of my conscious process when composing. BC: When you use electronics or recording technology, how do you like to replace the deeply anthropogenic, improvisatory, ephemeral and (inter-)subjective ideas of performing arts embedded in Indian thoughts? SS: Well, I don’t think these ideas need to be replaced necessarily as much as I feel the need to reinvent them for the new context by truly and completely committing to bringing my embodied presence in the performance space.

CHAPTER 28

Joseph Kamaru

Joseph Kamaru’s prolific work came to the attention of many, including me, in 2019. In early 2020, we contributed together to ‘radio in between spaces’ curated by Thomas Glaesser.1 After that show, I came in touch with him asking for an in-depth exchange from the perspective of this project. He responded to my email questionnaire to develop the following concise conversation. BC: How did you come to work with sound art and experimental music? Please provide me with a personal background. JK: My practice with sound art and experimental music was as early as in 2017, but currently I am using field recordings as a sound material and in my listening directions. I was part of a residency which happened on a train journey from Nairobi to Mombasa, and during this journey, I was intrigued by the locomotive train sounds, which I ended up recording on my iPod by hanging earphones off the window and recording long train soundscapes. Departing from the material, I later collaborated with Leon Omondi (Manch!ld) on a

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Joseph Kamaru—JK.   See the event details: https://www.adkdw.org/en/article/2220_radio_in_between_ spaces 1

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three-track EP—EAST.2 My interest in field recordings and sounds grew in the latter years, experimenting more with sounds in my music and recording a lot on my phone. This changed when I purchased a Zoom H6, which really excited me, as I had a new pair of ears, and realised I was missing much from my surroundings. I took more focused and intentional field trips in different parts of Nairobi, and whenever I travelled, I also recorded sounds and wrote compositions from the sounds. This has evolved into more ways of presenting the field recordings, either in album formats, performances or exhibitions. BC: What were the specific sparks for your interest in working with sound? JK: My surroundings and my parents’ house have been a huge contribution to my interest in sound. Being born and raised in Nairobi, in the city, has been a big influence. I never thought I’d find so much peace in my surroundings because of the different sounds that I encountered every day, and the fact that we lived in a flat that was next to the main street to the CBD.  Moving to our current home, which is more quiet and calm, the place heightened my listening as the environment and its sounds became more present. BC: Who are the inspirations for your work with sound—anyone or any source (person, label, organisation, group, band etc.) from Africa? JK: Within Africa, my grandfather3 has been an inspiration both on his approach to use sound and music to probe social and political discourses and also his engagement with nature, which I later discovered while working on a reissue project of his works. Other artists engaging with sound who have been of inspiration include Slikback, Dj Raph, both from Kenya; Nyirabikali Lierman, Emeka Ogboh, amongst others. BC: How is the sound culture in Africa different from the European/ Western canon of sound aesthetics and practice in your opinion? JK: Well, in Africa, there’s a broad scope of different sound practices which are all different and diverse. One thing that stands out is that in most African sounding cultures, both sound, music and dance

 Listen: https://kmru.bandcamp.com/album/east  Joseph Kamaru (1939–2018) was a Kenyan Benga and gospel musician and political activist. 2 3

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are relational. Sound has always played a critical role in the livelihoods, interaction and social engagements in these communities. What do you think of as a sound canon in the African context? What are the traditional sounds in your opinion? For me, traditional sounds and music are the heritage of its contemporaries within their locations and associated with their cultures. The sounds can survive the Western impacts and forces of acculturation and are therefore quite distinct in idiom and orientation from the contemporary. Traditional sounds are not really a style of music as these ‘traditional or exotic’ sounds are still music within normal practices of these communities, and they are not exotic to the people practising this music. Do you locate certain tendencies in your own work drawing ideas from the traditional sound cultures in Africa? Are there any? The improvisatory way of composition of music, freeform and antiphonal styles. Most of my music is quite intuitive and this is what I get a lot from the musics from Africa and its diaspora. How do you conceptualise the idea of time (e.g. duration and temporality) in your work? Most of my recent compositions are written purely in a nonlinear way, although there’s a start and finish. I have become more accustomed to not using the time factor within software I use for composition. Always leaning towards a more cyclic time and more improvisatory approach which impetus a freedom of how to think of time in music. How do you conceptualise the idea of space (e.g. perspective, depth of field) in your work? With Field recording, I tend to evoke a subliminal listening, which is always triggered by the spaces of where the sounds have been recorded. I think of spaces as both real or imagined and try to execute this with sounds and field recordings. How do you conceptualise the idea of improvisation in your work? I approach improvisation in a more sporadic and spontaneous direction while in the field or in the studio and working on a piece. This is mostly influenced by the tools that I used to create the piece. But I am always open-minded while improvising as I just hit the record button and let the sounds flow, either from analogue synthesisers or through generative sounds within Max/MSP, Ableton or any DAWs.

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BC: How do you conceptualise the idea of attention in your work? JK: As aforementioned, I try to evoke the subliminal using sounds. This works best when I work on durational compositions or performances, which take time to evolve, positing an attention to the works. Listening plays a critical role in these works. BC: Do you work with ritual elements from African traditional music? How do you like to relate to these religious, social and customary aspects of African sound culture, and how do you innovate on your own terms? JK: I have a strong connection with African instrumentation, as I have built one Obokano—a lyre from the Gusii community in Kenya.4 This is one of the few traditional instruments that I connect to. I am also quite grounded with my community Agikuyu which I gained a lot from my grandfather and my family. This translates in some way in my works, in which I try to employ these practices and consider new contemporary directions to take them. BC: The idea of ‘sound art’ or ‘sonic arts’ is departing from a typical Western musical tradition where tonal structures are discreet and quantifiable. How do you interpret the African systems of polyrhythms and an oral transfer of sound? Do these ideas reflect in your artwork? JK: This brings me back to the instrument, which I mentioned before, as it’s not particularly tuned to a Western scale. It’s tuned to the performer’s ear and liking—leaving it open. This is something that’s evident in many traditional African instruments. Sound Art has been brought more into institutional-based systems with works by John Cage, among other Western canonical figures, but I believe artistic practice with sound was already there before as seen in different communities’ involvement in music and dance across the globe. It’s more of how I feel, not interpret, to different rhythms and polyrhythms. Oral transfer of sounds and music within the African context is done mostly through apprenticeship, whereby generations pass information and skills to the next; and it is all community-­based. Sound has always been intuitive in African cultural practices, some sounding cultures from communities in Africa practice musics, which in a Western context could be considered as

4  Gusii are a highly diverse East African ethnic group from Western Kenya speaking Bantu language.

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‘sound art’ by a Western ear. But for the Africans, it’s just sound, music or dance. When you use electronics or recording technology, how do you like to replace the social, ritual, mystical, improvisatory, and ephemeral ideas of music and performing arts embedded in the African thoughts around sound? I always embrace spontaneity and randomness when using electronics and technologies. Do you think there is a possibility of a confluence of cultures, between Africa and Europe, and between Global North and Global South in your work? How do you identify yourself? There is a sense of collaboration happening, this has been happening for a long time. Some of it is quite problematic, for example, white people recording exotic musicians within the continent, and mixing with electronic music, and being considered as world music. Although technology is accessible in most parts of Africa, there is a need for more equal collaborations between Africa and other parts of the world, Europe, Asia and America. What is your comment on Western colonisation of African sounds and embedded listening? How do you like to decolonise sounds in your own work, if it’s possible? I’m not happy with how there’s bleaching of different genres which are of African origins but owned by the West. Credit is due where it’s worth; the originators should benefit from their works, and be credited. The idea of the decolonisation of sound is changing with time, and enhancing this occurs not only in my work, but bringing this to a wider scope of the community and working on specific thematic projects, gives artists space and freedom to freely experiment and share their works. How do you engage with the audience? Do you like to entertain them? I’m not really entertaining the audience, mostly probing a deeper listening in my performances, and releases.

CHAPTER 29

Hemant Sreekumar

I recorded this conversation in Delhi on a portable audio recorder, sitting at the temporary residence of Hemant Sreekumar, who was visiting Delhi on work. I have known Hemant for many years, and we had a number of exchanges previously on various projects. Responding to my invitation, he contributed to ‘Anthology of Exploratory Music from India’ (2021),1 which I curated for USG label, Italy. As we were conversing, sounds of a vibrant neighbourhood of Delhi was entering the room and the recording media, including the calls of many street hawkers selling rugs, utensils, fruits and vegetables, and whatnot. BC: HS: BC: HS:

Did you study Buddhist Iconography in the art school? Hindu and Buddhist. How did you come across sound as a medium? I was working with sound formerly; before that I was already using objects like clocks, tape cassettes, also non-harmonic guitars for cut ups mostly. But for the longest time, I never featured it outside because I didn’t find it relevant for everyone. It was more like a

Abbreviations: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC; Hemant Sreekumar—HS. 1  Listen: https://unexplainedsoundsgroup.bandcamp.com/album/anthology-of-exploratorymusic-from-india

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_29

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tinkering thing, which went on for ten to twelve years in the house. I started using the computer around 2003. I got into that quite late. The first years, around 2002 or 2003, I started only with emails. But essentially performing on this formula which I am doing now, started from 2011. I have been claiming to be a performance artist dealing with sound and such things but most of my exposure since the last decade came from PirateBay. Before that, we didn’t have access to more abstract sound. I was also employed at Khoj for as long as five years or so.2 I met a lot of artists over there, sound artists, and through them, I realised that there is a long history behind this. That got me into reading Futurist and Dadaist work with sound; it was very liberating for me. It felt like what we have been tinkering with is not really nonsense but it has a long history. That gave me confidence, put me in a very comfortable space. But recently I have been working with pure data and statistics for the last eight or nine years and I stuck to that because it’s been quite convenient with the pure data. As I was working in Linux system, pure data was the only thing that could run properly in those systems. I think in the beginning you are always trying to copy the stuff that you admire which for me were mostly Japanese composers of the 80s. They had very extreme sound and the Pure Data, which was very convenient to make those very textured, long, self-evolving. In the beginning, you started tinkering with objects? Yeah, like clocks, utensils, small resonators. I don’t use them any longer because I like the synthetic side of what the digital provides. Now that I look back, it was mostly foundational stuff. It was not really being aware of what you were doing; it really came from a sense of tinkering. It was only when I went to Khoj that I found people considering it as an art form. You said that in the beginning you were inspired by the Japanese artists. Do you want to mention some specific artists by whom you were inspired, initially in Khoj, and then internationally? Initially PirateBay used to give entire discographies. We used to listen to tracks without even knowing the name of the artist. But, of course, the usual suspects stood out, like Merzbow. You can also connect them with the Dada aesthetic, this sort of neo-realistic out-

 Khoj International Artists Association, https://khojworkshop.org

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put, self-indulgence for the sake of self-indulgence. But that attitude was very helpful when you don’t really want the audience to have a good time. And you also walk out of this music business model, which has tracks of three or four minutes of rubbish because it always comes with the constraint of the recording medium that songs have to follow certain things like this. Back then I was not really into recording stuff which made the performance more natural because it’s very direct. And this stuff is such nonsense that I didn’t find any point in recording them. Even now I am a bit suspicious of this entire recording thing. Performances are really where you can feel the electrons move in the air. And also temporally, spatially more open-ended. At least I still don’t really look outside, I don’t really know. But you really feel when people are leaving. I think, the first proper performance would be at CSDS, in North Campus. They used to have this performance art event and Salim used to host that. That was the first time I had complete control over the room, the environment, and it was one room with wooden surfaces so the sound was very interesting. That really helped because from an audience of 15, by the end there were only three or four left. You could really work with extremely high frequencies and also Salim, at the time when he was posting, was very non-judgmental in his curation, which I really liked. He was not really judging who was what or whose calibre is what. It’s just like ‘Come and do what you want’. There were people urinating on fire, and there was some poetry about Kashmir, etc. I think that is where I got the taste for performance. I am talking a lot of performance art, because the years I was working there, a lot of curations were happening around performance art. I think performance has a lot to do with stuff like inflicting pain on the body—on your own body, on other people’s body. Predominantly I have grown up in Delhi, and I have seen the city change so that always had a big impact on me—living in this noise machine. It’s more evident, especially in Karol Bagh where people are also loud. So this is why I just wanted to bring that kind of sense of being alive in such performances. And what started as a bad joke has carried on. Did you perform in Europe? Do you have any collaboration with European organisations or artists? Very Rarely. Even last year, in December or January I was in a residency supported by the Goethe Institute Bangalore. They have an

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exchange program with Munich, Germany. That was my entry into sound art. There is a scene over there. In a city like Munich, one doesn’t expect sound like that. I have met some very nice, very expressive people over there although it’s not Berlin for sure. There are not too many crazy people; you hardly find anyone. But no collaboration or anything resulted out of that. I met some nice people, but there was no actual collaboration or anything like that. BC: Do you find their attitude towards sound different? Speaking from a cultural perspective, and artistic traditions, do you find some differences in terms of European listening perspectives and European reference points sounding? Is your practice different, and if it is different in which way? HS: I went for this festival that hosted experimental music that was promoted and happening in the Fine Arts Academy. I felt sound art has almost become classical over there. Because the consumers, the audience, lot of them were above the age of 50 or 60, they were very patiently sitting and absorbing it, it was very nice. It was very humbling to see that sort of a thing. Clearly, there is a much longer tradition with things such as breaking out of the harmony, melody especially in Germany, with their history in synthesisers. They also have this pagan, ritualistic side. I think there were few performances, which were not by Europeans; it was by some Japanese people. It was just dealing with breath and blowing it into a balloon, it was just that—working with silence in this way. Definitely, the audiences are not coming over to get entertained, I really appreciated that. Over here, the more you perform, you find that there are a set of expectations because visually they are seeing things like what the DJs use. There is this expectation of it becoming louder, but it never happens. I think they are very aware of the history, a lot of people come for things like that and they really know this thing. Actually, the good thing is that when you connect with people it is more real. I don’t really believe in reality in this context, but in the sense that it’s more immediate because there is no history, no intellectual stamina to grasp. It is just in a very emotional sense. BC: Experiential. HS: Over there people are more focused and they pay attention to a lot of nuances. The conversations that follow are a lot richer; they get into the technical side of it. Over here, you are asked—‘Which soft-

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ware do you use?’ and we have to tell them ‘We make software, we don’t use software’. That way, in Europe, the conversation is not about the petty side of things. I really like that. It gets into more emotional aspects of what you are trying to affect. Either the people stay away or they hug you, which is also nice—two extreme reactions. BC: You think at the level of toying with the idea that there is an aesthetic disconnect. Maybe sound art, so to speak, is not falling into a traditional box, which we know or are familiar with. Do you think, traditionally speaking, within sound art and the way it is defined, even noise music can fit in? Is there something that people can relate to? HS: Maybe I’ll just put it like that, I think it would be three to four weeks ago that I was with my parents at the beach and that was the best sort of noise. It was something I totally admired. There was no rhythm or harmony, no melody. It was just—‘SHZZZZZZZ’ (chaotic). But here in India we often look upon sound and music as a traditional thing, so there is definitely this drone of sitar, veena or string oscillation. But more recently we have begun to assume that sound is a consumer product related to the trauma of being alive. Those songs with catchy choruses are important and they should be for a lot of people. I think music really helps them. If it weren’t for music, they would be killing each other. According to the European academics, one must deconstruct everything. That is definitely a no-no. Yes, there is an awareness especially when I work with string synthesis algorithms from a plucked string to a percussive thing. You do find people associating with them. There is something but they are not able to be very eloquent about what they feel over here. There is a basic sense of sensibility, but there is no eloquence because there is no direct knowledge of its historical trajectory or of where it’s coming from. I do feel that there is another form of academic colonisation that people like me and others have been subjected to. We have taken this breakdown of European aesthetics, which happened in the 1920s. Now with more access to tools, it is coming out. Nowadays there is an option to not follow this classical musical pattern, where it’s all about music, but rather try more abstract things. The young people that I see are still in this sort of techno or slow-techno thing. But the textures that they are exploring are getting very abstract. On the other hand, the cynical side of

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me also says that, of course, because they are also using such advanced software like Ableton etc., everything is like a canned sound, which you could stretch—you do the ADSR and it turns into this thing. BC: I was wondering whether it is possible to bridge the gulf between ‘sound art’ or ‘noise music’, and the classical traditions/music of India—the court music—which is termed ‘classical music’. There is a lot of possibility for sonic exploration, spatio-temporality. Dhrupad, for example, and also folk or regional music, with their melody and their complex narrative structures, their recapitulation in cyclic orders may have a lot to say to sound art methodologies and practices. Do you think there is a possibility of such connecting between the sounds and listening approaches? We consider that sound art was born out of the European Avant-garde influences, particularly the Dadaists movement, noise movement, Italian futurism and so on. What kind of knowledge system was influencing sound art to be born in India? There seems to me a disconnection between traditions we live by for thousands of years, and ‘sound art’ in the way it is defined in Western media art history. If there is a disconnection, is it possible to relate to it or build a bridge by drawing ideas from traditional knowledge in South Asia? How can we think of reclaiming ‘sound art’? HS: Yeah in the sense that, if we again think with the analogy that even in the era of nationalism, for the generation of the 1890s or 1910s, when they were young, for them it was revolutionary. We started thinking of all of us as one country, which was again a European idea. In the same way when we take that we end up doing something very awkward and different. It is the same with mobile tech that hit the Indian market as lot of our contemporaries did not really go from the telegraph to phone. It was directly to a Jio that was meant for watching films on phone. That is the consumer side but there is also the other side where you can start a riot very fast, just by using a phone. Just make a photograph of Prophet Mohammad looking like a pig, tag someone in it, and there is someone waiting somewhere to kill. That is what happens in India. I find it quite interesting. And to use the same analogy, I think certain ­generations were always aware of the European nuances of sound art but it was through the tradition of knowing about Europe. They did tap some emotional side, which I appreciated, so

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now the question is how to take it and mix it into something else. The thing that I like about sound art is that it does not feel like any country. It has this sort of thing, which can’t really be geo-­ positioned like classical music—‘Okay, that’s from there, that’s from Tripura’. You cannot geolocate it. In that way, sound art is this very modern thing, which does not know any national boundaries. You just know it has come from some industrialised country where people have permanently adapted to cities and they have the leisure time to make this and there is no expectation of ‘correctness’ from avant-garde art because they are releasing it for something like that. But definitely there will be space because the tradition is not going to die ever; it will just mutate into something that no one knows. I think sound art is the most fertile place where lot of things will co-exist without wiping each other out. This is what a lot of commercial music or trends end up doing. Sound art is a more open thing. You filter out what you want. We need oxygen to breathe, to exist, but it is not like you banish out all the nitrogen from the air. Sound art is a healthier atmosphere. Yes, but still the noise music scene here is drawing heavily from noise music practices in the West. Yes, totally. Is it possible to situate it within the territory from which it emerges like India, South Asia? I think things like the old Stockhausen stuff and all that were the late industrial stage in these countries where the youth of that time as well whatever was happening in Japan (which I am not that aware of), was the fag end of that ugly industrial thing. They were trying to clean up their ecosystems. Look at the time of the early British stuff. It is the end of that ugly smoke. So you also find that ‘factories are shutting down the workers’ thing coming over here. I think in India especially, for me Broadband Internet in 2004 was the defining thing that changed a lot of things just because the access brought on many changes. What happens in 2004 is not just the arrival of broadband Internet but also China happened at the same time. You know this literal democratisation of tech when everything becomes very affordable. Earlier you had to be really wealthy to own a keyboard but now you just buy a Midi controller and computers are so cheap. All these devices have a ready market over here. I think broadband is really the big thing. I see people much

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younger than me, around 10 or 15 years younger than me, who have grown up in this environment. They don’t even know why the Windows system starts with a C drive, because they have not seen the AOB drives. They don’t know about the floppy disk or anything like that. But they have so much culture at the end of their fingertips; the entire archive of human cultural histories. The amount of knowledge they have is something I hardly have. You know, it’s just because they have the stamina to explore so much of this weird abstract stuff, which was neither very mainstream nor popular. But it was an important character of that generation which this generation got access to. BC: It’s very important to have canonical references or knowledge systems. It is highly problematic that our sound practices are constantly adding to or drawing from a European Western sound (art) canon. I am trying to question if a sound thinking canon exists in India from which we can draw inspirations. HS: I am not aware of anything like the existence of a canon but personally in my compositional process, I can think of temple drums to which I have been exposed to as a kid, which is not really the traditional or more evolved percussion, but is really (making sounds) almost like hitting a trash can with resonators. There are also lots of insect sounds; lot of insects, heavy rain etc. and that’s such a bright white noise. It is kind of a static thing. Over here, so many of these ambiences are freezers and A.C.s and something like that. These are the rudiments you are composing from, things that have always existed. As a child do you remember that the biggest toy was the radio set? It was never the new that we were interested in, but it was more of channel shifting; we are perhaps the first TV generation. We have seen colour TV happen in front of us. So yes, it comes from the culture of the electronic consumer products. They are in the house while you are growing up as a child and you have access to them. Personally, for me, it’s a mixture of that and pure nature. For me, on a purely acoustic level, they become almost the same thing because you can’t really make account of whether something is coming from the beach or from a dead TV signal. Nowadays you hardly get to see any antennae; you only find the big ones. Back then every house had its own set of antennas and you had to tune it. Clearly, those memories are present while you are composing.

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But canonically, at least I am not aware of a localised cannon of sound practice as such. BC: The idea of decolonisation is heavily based on self-determination. You are a subject that was oppressed by a colonial-imperial power and are now trying to self-determine, so that there is a resistance against oppressive power structures. Self-determination is happening all over the world today. If you look at the Right Wing’s emergence, in India, Brazil, and in other parts of the world, it is actually entangled with processes of self-determination—taking the idea of self-determination to the conservative extremes in a self-destructive manner. In India, it is going completely in a wrong direction, breeding a regressive mindset. But self-determination can have a positive outcome. Former colonial subjects are trying to figure out who we are as this façade of colonial hangover is slowly disappearing. One needs to reconfigure the identity. HS: In a way, I don’t think we are still decolonised or that there is any possibility of us getting decolonised. It starts from East India Company, a private equity firm, when Britain came here to trade commodity. It passes to the crown because they fucked up. It was a private corporation who was fucked up and that’s why the Queen had to take over. But now still you are slaves of other kinds of private equity. Why is your Uber so cheap, why are your data services so cheap? Someone is paying for it and there are funds coming from some other mutual fund, which is getting divested so that that people’s habits change. It is another form of colonisation. Perhaps later we will realise its ill effects. Therefore I really see that purity emerging from any form of decolonisation, because you just go from one end to other. Well these are what I see in my surroundings that. Even for India, so many people from our father’s generation are totally hooked to watching television. My grandfather’s generation got hooked to TV. They stopped engaging in proper work and they got too weak, so TV was the only thing for them. Our father’s generation is just on WhatsApp. You are right in saying that it is getting more regressive because it is an instantaneous, push-of-a-thumb reaction and all that going across, bouncing in an echo chamber. It also feudalises you a lot more. BC: Yes. I am talking about the gross regression in the way self-­ determination is falsely or wrongly appropriated by groups like

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RSS, hijacking India toward a downward spiral from a wrong perspective. Yeah, I think they are the most colonial. Because right from the uniform to the original stuff of Golwalkar and all this. They were very Westernised in their sense of nationalism. I don’t know what books they read—Savarkar and all that. But it all starts at India House in London where the Indian Communism and Indian Right Wing start. But I think they are way more colonised themselves. Like the RSS. They were the allies of the colonial British. In terms of self-­ determination, if you think of yourself as someone who would be interested to draw ideas from some Eastern or Global South canon and sonic epistemologies and knowledge bases, how can you imagine yourself drawing ideas from these other sources? I am trying to detune myself from this occidental way of looking at a sphere because it was again an Anglophilic way of looking at it. The occidental and the oriental are relative terms and based on where you are looking at from and taking which geographical side or position. I am still trying to take away these syntaxes. But I know what you mean, this East–West duality. East and West don’t exist as separate geologic regions and cultures anymore in a post-globalising world. Global North and Global South are also problematic binaries. But there is a definitive difference between ways of listening. For example, I locate in my project three different parameters of this difference: time, non-linear temporality as against the linear movement of time in the so-called West. The cyclic movement of time and non-linearity of time and memory is something I underscore here. Time can be juxtaposed with one another; it can be layered upon; there is a sense of recapitulation and going backwards, and going slow. Then comes perspective. If you look at visual-art history in the West, there is a strong sense of geometric perspective that comes ultimately from a kind of utilitarian and consumptive idea of image = that one should make a meaning out of it. But if you look at Indian miniatures and Asian paintings, you will find there is a lack of geometric perspective. In sound practice also this sense of perspective is very important. There is temporality, perspective and subjectivity. Subjectivity can be manifested through the improvisational aspect of sound— improvisation where reciprocity and inter-subjective relations are

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more important than having a commodified idea of music in a staged performance or in a CD album, or as you already mentioned, in the recording business. In the Middle East, there is a strong sense of inter-subjectivity through improvisational forms such as Zār or Tarab. If you know about Tarab, you will know that a sonic experience is built or constructed through the participation of the listener. Without the presence of the listener nothing can work. The dialogue through sound is the traditional core of Tarab. But the Western colonial influences have eaten up the intricacies of Tarab and Maqām. Like the 24 intricate Shrutis, Maqām is the division of sound into 72 different sonic textures. The European colonial intervention in this field manifested in such a way that European musicologists reduced Maqāms into a 12-tone structure thus squeezing the possibility of sound. The colonial listening couldn’t decipher the 72 different intricate layers of Maqāms, so they were appropriated within modernist modes. Okay, so that’s quite interesting. I didn’t know; I wasn’t aware of this at all. Similar example would be the resistance of the Dhrupad and Khayal musicians of India when the British officer and engineer Gaisberg began recording in India in 1902.3 They brought the Gramophone Company and started recording the musicians in India. It was like a colonial ethnography of its subjects. I think the American Institute has an archive of the music out here, in Gurgaon.4 Gaisberg started recording Gauhar Jaan and many other bai jis. But many of the Dhrupad singers and classical musicians resisted recording. It was as if they said, ‘No, this is not the way to document our work. Our work is timeless’. You cannot limit the timeless aspect of improvisation in Dhrupad or even Khayal. In a similar example, 72 Maqāms were reduced for the European ear to understand, so the possibility had to be squeezed to 12 tone equal temperaments. It is kind of a colonisation of the sound. The same thing happened in India through recording. Colonisation of the timeless Dhrupad

3   Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya (2021). “Uncolonising Early Sound Recordings”.The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory (Special Issue: Sound, Colonialism, and Power). 4  Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology: https://www.indiastudies.org/ ethnomusicology/

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performance turned it into something limited, durational and linear. This is something very influential in terms of the way we think, the way we listen and the way we perceive sound today—the way we think of sound as an experience itself. The timelessness and temporally open-ended listening methods were traditionally practised in India. I ask whether as ‘sound artists’, we need to be aware of that; do we need to go back, and trace back and uncover knowledge? HS: I have never thought of it like this, but yes it is quite important I guess. This act of taking steps back, because mostly you also get conditioned by the architecture and context within which you are performing. Even if it’s an art gallery, there is a constraint of the consumers’ attention span. You are there almost like a freak show. When you are there in a performance, the people are consuming alcohol and other things. They are almost taking it like something which is meant to help you digest food or linger around longer and consume alcohol that fills up the coffers of the institution. Actually, the only time when I performed for two hours was at this performance art festival in Goa; it was the Serendipity Art Festival. And this was the second collaborative project I did with a person named Bhagwati who draws and also works a lot with voice. BC: Yes, he was a part of Sarai, CSDS. HS: Yeah, totally. So that’s the first time we could actually stretch this thing. But what you are saying is something I actually have never had a context to think about like that. I mean if I think from the organiser’s side, or even when I am organising myself I always have this limited duration. You are working on the same lines as that of the entertainment venue. And no matter how Avant-Garde you can claim to be, personally, the larger thing that forces you to make your entire composition like a performance is very transactional. It almost gets commodified. Referring to what you are saying, I think the closest coordination is when you are sitting alone and working in the room. I think personally that is the only time when I can claim to be an artist. But when the performance happens it is literally a commodified, memorised format that is going on. The most enjoyable stuff is actually when you are working alone in a monastic mode. But then there is also this fact that there is no audience. And I think the interesting thing about the Indian classical, as much as I have come to know through my studies, has to do with that sense of patronage and the history of wars in the sense that there were

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few kings who didn’t care about war. They were okay with whatever trade was happening and couple of the chieftains taking care of their horses and army, while they just sat there and chilled. And classical musicians were their video game or like some object of fancy. They had the time and the drugs and the environment for classical musicians to evolve and develop this sense of identity. The classical musicians, the hijras, the dancers, this entire entourage was there to please the nobles. There was a hierarchy of where they got this luxury of time or self-identity and it came from the sense of patronage of peaceful kings. Here in Delhi, it could have been Sikh or Jahangir, who were the big patrons. Even when the chieftains of the smaller town had the time, it was because their fathers won the war and this generation had the time to sit and listen to all of this. I never thought about it from the musicians’ point of view, but I always saw the artist as someone who had this sort of being because of the history of war which someone else won and the third generation could enjoy his sense of being. Just like every parasite needs a host, the classical musicians within the Indian context have always been that. They didn’t need a direct consumer audience or a retail system like the Western guys did. There was no ticketing system; there may have been, but I don’t know about that. But mostly what you feel about the Gharanas, is that they are strict. It was the patronage system and the excess wealth that could nurture it; it is very cheap say in Delhi. You feel insulted as an artist when you hear that. But then when you really think about it, it is absolutely right. And now there are modern cultural MNCs like Max Mueller and the French Council. They are like multinational cultural corporations; they are not corporates but they act like cultural corporations. BC: Also the galleries, which own artists (artists who are represented by a gallery, I mean); it’s like making an agreement with the gallery that your work will be sold to that public. That’s also a form of patronage system. HS: Yeah, yeah it is more like this exclusive (copy)right. It is like saying—‘We are the only distributers of your product and so we take a premium on that; you are yet another one item in our inventory of gallery record labels and the entire thing’. In that way I think ­classical music fell into a worse condition, because this sense of patronage totally changed. With the Lalit Kala-s and all that, you

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needed that sort of sense of being—that larger spectacle. When you look at the miniature paintings you see that someone is shagging off the king, he is enjoying it and there is a classical musician there and that’s great. Yes that’s kind of a scene of decadence. I am not looking at classical music but thinking about the knowledge system that is evolving and if there is a possibility to borrow expressions or ideas and epistemologies from embedded sound practices. There should be, but then again mostly I don’t have the space, exposure or the stamina to enquire or curate a thought like this. Honestly, I never came across a thought like that. What can we take back from this much older legacy? Yes, legacy. It is not classical music but classical culture, tradition or virasat or Khandan, because the entry point for self-determining our de-colonial self or de-colonial being/subject/subjectivity is to be aware of where we come from. This self-awareness is something crucial here. I think at its best that’s all decolonisation can be. This awareness as you said. I mean literally if you measure it, you can’t totally decolonise at all; not in a lifetime. You know, recently when I was talking to an American, I think he forgot that till the 60s, Black men couldn’t vote. It is very easy for a white American to forget that. But in India when you look at them you see them as European immigrants with lot of privileges the movements that had been won. But it did not happen in the USA, so they were still colonised in a certain way. Here also with all this Ambedkar iconisation everywhere, I hope that there is some self-realisation, and I do feel that something will be filtering down. But again when you look at a phenomenon like BSP or something like that, the self-awareness can glitch out quite fast. It moves from self-awareness to illogical pride and that’s my only fear about this legacy stuff because it gives this authoritarian sense of you are right or you are wrong. And there need not be a cause for that authority; it is more that sort of sense of ‘I am the law’, which for me is a bit scary. It’s a scary place to be in. I used to even train in music, you literally at one point forget all that. I never feel that—‘this note does not feel correct’; I don’t feel like that. One can draw from it without falling into this trap of strictness or sense of ‘purity’ of the legacy.

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HS: I think we always take matters from what we have been exposed to and for me that exposure had always been like being in an army where they get called off for not marching the right way. For me, the European Avant-Garde was amazing. This was like swimming and that was like marching. You know this was a live classical notated music system and I loved assuming this free thing. The former almost felt in a way like you have to march into a certain line, always acknowledge the other and this sort of thing. And here, you could be deeply self-indulgent, totally unaware of anything but your brain and not even your eyes. You just close your eyes and feel it, and that’s the magic of European avant-garde for me. BC: European avant-garde is indebted to American minimalism. The American minimalism music draws heavily from Indian classical music. Pandit Pran Nath was the teacher of Terry Riley, La Monte Young. They are drawing on the basic ideas of open-ended composition and drone from Indian classical music. HS: Yeah, I think the late 50s and 60s had this idea of ‘looking at the East’. The drugs and also the birth of software industry influenced it. I think there is a new Tarantino film that looks at this period of the 1960s, but I have not seen it yet. Well, you are right; like Pran Nath and I think it was also the drone—this sustained single note that was long. BC: Microtonality. How is it possible that as a sound artist you think of microtonality as your tradition and you build your work on that idea of sound? Did you imagine what was possible in the context of sound art and your specific field, noise music or electronically produced sound by drawing idea from the Indian tradition? HS: No. BC: For example, iconography; Hindu and Buddhist iconography. HS: Actually none. It is important for me to cut the line and not to have this traditional Indianness or the oriental. BC: You have never tried or thought of it? HS: Never wanted to. I just wanted it to be like it could have been from anywhere or nowhere. Also, it has this sense of unrootedness. I think yesterday a radio musician asked me where I was from and my first reaction was ‘I am from the Earth’. It again becomes this geolocation, history, tradition and for me, it was important to totally severe it and not have anything. But, of course, you are exposed to it since childhood. You can’t ever disconnect anything like that. But

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at least you lie to yourself. What I do is support the act of lying to myself about the distancing or cutting the threads from the roots. What was the reason for cutting yourself from your roots? I can’t really be eloquent about it as there is no specific reason. I think again it was an act of defining yourself but without any cause. Just like a Coca Cola or something or like a meaningless product. But you like to define yourself like that, with no roots, rootless not without a glorious legacy or a good future. It’s not like I hate traditional culture. It’s also quite important not to have that burden, I don’t know why. It did allow a lot of more expanded view of the future. That’s very interesting and this is very common. This trend is not only common among Indian sound practitioners. The attitude to cut from the tradition is there in Morocco, in Egypt, in the Middle East; there artists are stating that ‘I don’t want to be part of our tradition. I am a global, universal being’. Yeah, what do you feel about that? I have been working with sound for last 12 to 13  years. In the beginning, I was drawn to the experiments of the European composers—not only contemporary classical composers like György Ligeti, Stockhausen, but also field recording artists who are recording sound from the nature and presenting them within an artistic context. But slowly I started to understand that if I uncritically follow that canon the ground beneath my feet would disappear. For the last three or four or five years, I am trying to go back to know who I am. Where do I come from? I have a deep fascination and respect for the Indian musical practices such as Dhrupad. Many of my artistic ideas like focusing on a tone and subtle modulation of that tone are coming from an in-depth listening to Dhrupad. I developed this interest lately when I started a process of self-­ determination or self-awareness. I was aware of the influences that I manifest in my work and I find out that I have a deep interest in microtonality, the grain of the voice and the imperfections of the Rudraveena—imperfection in the sense that not everything is exactly falling into place, but there are in-betweens. But yeah, it’s strange, right? Yes, this improvisational/immediate aspect of producing sound, which is between different notes, is actually the Shrutis. The idea of

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Shruti is malleable. This malleability is something I didn’t find in European sound knowledge. After having such a thought, do you still work on the digital platform or do you go back to the traditional instruments? I work with digital technologies, but I try to incorporate some ideas of microtonality, timelessness, longer duration and such things. I also work with multilayered and non-leaner narratives. Were you trained in classical music? Not necessarily, but I was trained in classical music singing during my boyhood; my mother was a singer. That was there as an inception. Also there was the listening experience of Dhrupad and a long exposure to radio broadcast of classical music. My brother-in-law, the foremost Indian artist and sculptor Sarbari Roy Choudhury, was a great connoisseur of Indian classical music.5 He had a large collection of bootleg tapes and reel-to-reel and I was also listening to his archives. That’s the primordial spark for my becoming a sound practitioner. I find that this sonic confluence between East and West sound worlds and listening approaches manifests in my work. I think even the Indian tradition is such a cosmological sort of a space because there are Persians, there is also the oriental stuff, all of that stuff. Also, I think in the South while growing up, everyday morning it was just classical music. So it’s already a part of your story; even if you are not there you can’t cut off something like that. But at least it is a pretense; it is like wearing a cloth like a shirt or something like that; self-deception. For me, it was not cutting out of my tradition. I was always trying to figure out how I can relate my work towards roots, traditional ideas, and sources embedded in my growing up as an artist. The primary drive for this interview project is to find peers from the Global South who are thinking in a similar line; this cutting off you mentioned, this intention to cut yourself out from tradition is something common to artists from Global South fraught with a colonial history and currently going through self-determination. Yes, I guess I never thought of it like that because I am also not thinking about the sound, but about visual arts or contemporary

5  See: https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/delhi/2021/jan/12/sarbaris-love-for-­ music-was-legendary-2248974.html

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art in which there is a Western approach of the Indian artists thinking ‘This is what the white audience wants’. So what you give them is this ‘India’ story. For the white audience, it is great to talk about matters in Kashmir, about Dalits or this thing. These are all tropes, that’s the thing. But anything apart from that is more selfish—this thing is not pretty, but that is all. As you were saying, self-­ determination is taking place even in Egypt and all other places. BC: Tarab, Egyptian music. Hours of being with yourself and finding the common resonance with your audience being there—this sense of presence is so important, but it is disrupted by recording medium. HS: Totally. I think it is also the fact that in Indian tradition we don’t really have that Industrial working class which has few leisure hours, few hours to sleep, where you had the fuel for a cultivated culture and hence music conception. And if you have to take away this sort of trauma of the Industrial working class and their leisure time, what you have is a stretched sense of being; a lot of traditions try to fill in this thing. I think even when you are studying temple architecture, we always think of them as the shopping malls of that time. That is where people used to hang around for social amusement and the reason of worship was a small part of it. But mostly it was commerce and business deals that were happening. The interesting thing is that with a lot of digital broadband-based technology, the entire loop might just hit back. Earlier you had the constraints of a 90-minute tape or a CD length and so it was no longer fluid. Even the way we consume movies now is because it doesn’t exist within the reel length limit and you don’t need to do a 90-minute movie. You can have a 200-hour movie, which you watch in episodes. That’s what Netflix is selling now like a long form of work. Even I tend to read it on the phone, like long articles. It’s not about this quick garbage because sometimes in the middle of all these long forms something has gone off and everything has become a short, consumable biscuit chunk. BC: Exactly. Think of Blues and Jazz. Black musicians used to play after long days of work. They came home and sat together and transcended the world of exploitation. But their improvisational sounds have been turned into something like bits and pieces of Jazz music, which could be sold on CDs and records or vinyl. This is a kind of appropriation.

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HS: Even I think reggae—although I don’t know much about it—was initially in Jamaica and all; you like getting the white man drunk and happy and pushing him off home and then that makes good bills for hotel and then for you. I think even jazz; at least in the end when it hit the stage, it was for a very different audience compared to the guys on the stage. Because the guy on the stage was lower class and the consumer who was paying for his time was the lord. I see so many children now on internet live streaming long session and all that, but I don’t have the guts to mix this thing. It is not just about the Facebook live phenomenon and all that. This is a new sense of community, which is not this transactional thing. People just popping for a few seconds, some might be listening to the entire session or something like that. BC: Maybe that’s an example of resistance against commodification, imperialism, European colonialism. HS: I think music became a commodity because no one ever sold you music; they sold you the right to listen to music. That’s why the CD, tape, vinyl, etc. created so much revenue—it was because you didn’t own the music. You owned the right to listen; it is like that thing or tape was a legal document, right? From an artist’s point of view this is rubbish, but it did create a lot of revenue for lot of pop musicians. BC: Corporates. HS: Yeah Corporates, they became rich for this. They were wealthier. Now that no one is buying it anymore, it is interesting; it’s nice, it is good actually as the entire system has gone down. But still it’s not really that good because it is still getting such subsidised Broadband space. The monopoly system has not gone, it’s just someone else has taken it up now. It’s not the old clients you are performing for; there are new clients who are the media. Because I see that a lot of young people, they don’t really understand and feel ‘Okay it’s free’. Well in a sense it works as though it is free but ‘you’ are the commodity for that. Because of your art that medium is relevant, so they might be allowing it to happen for free and your Telecom networks may be giving you good rates. It’s easy for you to upstream and all that. But people don’t think of it like a slavemaster relationship specially in India. A lot of artists don’t like to think of things like what medium is used, the legalities of this thing, etc. In the end, even in America, this Rock stardom had been sold

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so much and it dumbs you down. You don’t really want to actually confront the transactional bit of what you are doing. Even for lot of bar performers and all that, the motive of having a musician is for better dining, better beverage consumption. I do remember some people had their own set of server systems and were trying to do live-­streams, but then again the fact of how cheap Facebook streams are and all of that has just gone out. You don’t need to have your own server and upstream that. Any open source that ever started is all gone just because this California stuff is so cheap to consume. I am always a bit paranoid about anything coming from California. Of course, I use it, because you cannot live without using it. Anything you would like to add on your use of technology and how you appropriate technology? For me, it is the media and the OAC’s standard, which is open sound control. One thing that has helped me a lot is the fact that you can connect to any form of midi system. But as for the larger part of the synthesis, I don’t really do anything emotional because most of the algorithms and all you get from Wikipedia. All your references—pure data, programming in algorithms, etc.—are mostly pre notated and controlled. Do you think of opening up the control and creating something like generative sound works where machines or rather the situation within which it is composed is taking the control out of you? I have done one good composition, which does focus more on occurrences so I won’t really say it is generative. But I have not really tried this new machine learning, which can actually imbibe from existing techniques and then create something. I have had few successes with controlling random trigger-based stuff which are sort of endless in the sense that they can go on for 25 years and keep evolving. But yes, it again takes the ‘nowness’ out of it and that’s why these long forms are creative. However, sometimes when you make the patch on a software that you design, there is a way in which you can perform it. There is this sort of ‘oneness’; it’s like your own personal tool. It is like a hammer that you have fashioned and no one can use it the way you can. I still treasure that. I can perform with my eyes closed. And every time I perform, it changes. It depends on how you are feeling that day or how much water you have drunk or something like that. But that is something I truly value—that you create a software but every time you reproduce it

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the effect is very sophisticated and pleasant. Another thing is that it can be really charming and what I really like about this software is that you literally work with nothing but digits. This is why for me, it was giving a lot more credence that instruments of the larger band could not give. You can go super deep into yourself to communicate multiple personalities and produce something relevant out of it. That way for me software is very important. The act of crafting software is also like performing on a software and this is something I don’t find in string or other kinds of instruments or in any of the other skin-based percussion instruments. I just love the synthesis of computer. It’s not just a cool thing, I really enjoy this nothingness. That way I just feel a computer is the best thing to do noise music on and all the other stuff is just mimicry. BC: Thank you.

CHAPTER 30

Isuru Kumarasinghe

Isuru Kumarasinghe is a musician and sound artist from Sri Lanka and is based in Colombo. Through a listening practice, his work focuses on the experience of sound perception and sound movements. He is a self-taught artist, who creates tools to transmit philosophies of listening, affect and the relationship to the body into sound producing. He mainly works with electro-acoustic music improvisation, field recordings as well as sound installations and performance. Kumarasinghe extensively collaborates with musicians, dancers, theatre artists and filmmakers and is a co-founder of the Music Matters Collective in Colombo. He regularly produces music records and is currently co-founding the new producing studio Earscapes in Colombo. We only talked via Zoom and phone calls but never met each other in person though we have known about each other for some years through Sound Reasons Festival in Delhi. This conversation was likewise conducted via Zoom in a low bandwidth connection when I was in India stuck in COVID-19 quarantine at home in 2020. We spoke freely, even when the voice compressor was active in the Zoom algorithm filtering the respective room ambiences out, and some grains of our enthusiastic voice. Later in 2021, I invited Isuru

Abbreviations: Isuru Kumarasinghe—IK; Buddhaditya Chattopadhyay—BC. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8_30

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Kumarasinghe to contribute a work to ‘The Listening Biennial’ in Berlin and other venues.1 IK: Where would you like to start? BC: I would like to start by asking you about your growing up and coming to work with sound. IK: I was interested in music from a young age and in that time period, I was trying to compose things and understand things musically— more of compositions, sometimes songs, these are the kinds of things I was interested in at that time. But at one point I was practicing things and I wanted to connect it with my own way of recording; I wanted to produce it. In that period of time, I don’t think it was so popular; it was only the beginning of the early 2000s. I wanted to start with the understanding of the process of recording, process of making sound and the things I wanted to come up with. At that time, I was recording, finding software and ways to record, and I had to go through the process of asking people. There wasn’t any place to study or anything, so I was more interested in the acoustic-related thing. Then I found software and things which I figured out later; back then there was Cool Edit Pro, if you remember—these kinds of software are quite interesting since you can record and do a little bit of manipulation and also decide things. This was my beginning or starting point into getting a glimpse of the sound world in a way. Then most of the things I had to do by myself; I haven’t learnt from an Institute but I have learnt through practice. BC: Can you name a few artists who you found to be inspirational in your formative years? IK: At one point of my life, I was making composition and making music for theatre and things like that. That actually reached a point where I was searching how to manipulate sound, and I wasn’t sure whether I was doing sound art. At that time, I didn’t even know I was doing sound art. Later I figured out that it was the beginning of it. I wasn’t exactly inspired by particular persons. Interestingly later in my life—even right now—I was trying to go back and see in that time period what actually happened in that moment to make me think about sound elements. I wasn’t exactly inspired by a 1

 More information can be found on the biennial website: https://listeningbiennial.net/.

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­ erson, but by an idea. I wasn’t agreeing to whatever was known as p music for others. I am from a music background; I wasn’t coming from a pure sound art background in terms of what is known as sound art right now. I wasn’t completely inspired by someone, but luckily at one point, we had this collective which we are still a part of called Music Matters Collective, if you have heard of them.2 We started this around ten years ago. I have known some of them for 11 to 12 years and they were trying out things musically in different ways. We all wanted something common and that was having a platform to do experiments. At that time, we all were going through ourselves, studying, learning from each other and exploring things. That was the time when I was thinking more in the sound art sense. I was more interested in understanding a language in the sense of sound art. If I answer directly to your question, it was only later that I found out things; I went through John Cage and I went through some European composers such as Stockhausen. I found out these ones actually later. I wanted to realise and understand in detail what was happening there. BC: Okay, the Music Matters Collective was based in Colombo, right? IK: Yes. BC: In the beginning, you wanted to experiment with sound, but was there any inspirational spark that you can remember? What made you experiment with sound from the outset? IK: In that time period here, if you think about it socially, we were opening up to the world. It was the beginning of the internet and it was becoming popular. The transition from the analogue world to digital world happened from the late 1990s to 2000 when I was still listening to tapes, cassette tapes and things like that which I cannot fathom now, but then we didn’t have access to anything else. Right now we can access anything in the other corner of the world. At that moment we weren’t in such a period; it was only the beginning of the period. At that point I felt that the inspiration that came within me for sound; I had the feeling that I didn’t agree with certain things, which were happening, with respect to what I could hear. I wanted to find out things through which I could, at that time, express myself. That was the beginning, but I remember the 2  More information about Music Matters is available on their website: https://musicmatterssrilanka.com/.

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time period when I was deeply thinking about sound engineering and making sound specifically from equalisers and trying to understand what actually happens to the colour of something when it is filtered through that. This kind of process actually made me think about it, and feel that this is something I actually want. I didn’t want to exactly play the same instrument over and over again. I am not interested in that. I wanted to think about the quality of that sound; change the colour of that sound. So that was my beginning, the third process, but still it wasn’t there. It was only the very beginning of getting into the world of sound. BC: Did you listen to something particular at that time? Did listening help you enter this realm? Is it something you can remember— something that you listened to, that opened up your ears? IK: Okay, it’s actually interesting. We as a society come from a dominant Buddhist background. In the sense of listening, I know as a society we don’t practice that but as an idea, listening is there. I remember at one point my father was walking in the night in our garden, and once he said, ‘When in silence, you can hear the sounds from really far’. I remember that moment of him saying this: from our house, the main road or a highway was five to ten kilometres away. In the night you could hear the sound of that road, a very urban road, even sometimes distinctly specific sounds were heard. And when you are quiet, you can actually hear sounds from afar (I am from a city outside Colombo, so I can hear the harbour). You know the horns of the ships? It’s like travelling far to this area. I later realised that this thought inspired me in the sense of listening. This was there in the process. In a musical sense, if I talk about inspiration, I can’t exactly say much about that time. I don’t think I was interested in a particular sound; I was more interested in an idea as inspiration. This was at the time I was reading about John Cage, his works and things; I was not interested so much in his compositions, I was interested in some of his ideas. BC: Anything from the traditional sounds or music from Colombo, Sri Lanka, which you found inspirational or which was canonical knowledge in your work? IK: In the later years, one of my colleagues, Sumudi Suraweera, who is a drummer, founded Music Matters. He was doing his PhD on southern Sri Lankan drumming or low-country drumming, which comes from a ritual aspect. I don’t know whether you have heard

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about it, it is more kind of chant-based. It’s dance and music, so the ritual itself has a form, and in the musical sense, they were improvising at that point. That’s how the form works. If there were two drummers and a dancer, all three of them are improvising at that very moment. There is a form, there is a pattern, but the time can be dragged or be quick depending on the mood. It was really interesting. In my childhood, I didn’t know how to read that, later I realised with Sumudi, how I had to read this as sound art experimental rather than how I tried to read it before. The structures or the grid, or the specific time period is repeating—time as a repeated pattern, time as a rhythm, as the same thing happening in a very certain/equal time period and so on. That’s the way we learned even in the school. But I realised I didn’t have the language to understand this. We also have this Buddhist chant called Pirith.3 The Pirith is performed by a couple of monks and sometimes they chant throughout the night, which is a very monotonous but very microtonal structure. They have two/three maybe four notes— those are the maximum notes they can work with because they have a rule saying that you can’t have musical notes. You can have the notes but not at the same time. Because of that it was more of a drone but a very slow, changing drone. This inspired me a lot; most of my drones-like musical things come from there and it is one of my main inspirations in the traditional sense. Those two are quite present even right now in my life. BC: Did you study John Cage’s writings and other composers’/sound artists’ writing at that time? IK: I read some of the works of John Cage, especially about silence; the book is called Silence. I read that, but at that time I didn’t have a language to exactly understand some of the things. I think earlier his writing helped me to think in a different way about silence. Later I also read some of the writings of Pauline Oliveros. I read about Luigi Russolo’s ‘Art of Noise’ a bit later for knowing and understanding.4

3  Pirith (or Paritta) refers to the Buddhist practice of reciting verses and scriptures in order to protect the community and ward off misfortune and danger. It is a collective exercise of chanting in a community. 4  Russolo, Luigi (1913). The Art of Noise (futurist Manifesto). Something Else Press.

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BC: In one way, you are drawing inspiration from the traditional and ritual sound practices from Sri Lanka, and at the same time, you are going through Western canonical composers and sound artists through their ideas and writings. Did you find there were structural and fundamental differences in these approaches? IK: I did. I was able to understand why they had to do what they did in that time period—the political aspect as well, for example, their reply to their traditions, their reply to their classical practice which I understood later. But there is a difference in the point of view. I don’t think it came immediately; of course, it came after going through so much thinking ‘what is this, what is that, and who am I?’ and wondering about the question of where you are placed. When I was dealing with these questions, there were things they had addressed in that time period. I know that these composers were inspired by the East. I know most of them are inspired by Eastern philosophy. BC: Yes, John Cage, Oliveros, both of them. IK: Yes, both of them directly. It was like approaching the other side of the world and getting something from there; I understood that. Maybe in a way as a person who lives in this part of the world and who has seen this world throughout my childhood I was used to it. It is not a complete magic for me to see some of the ideas but at the same time as musicians, they were interested in the thought and that was quite interesting to me—to look back at where I live, at my society and its ideas. At the same time, I was also looking at somebody else taking this knowledge out of its context in a different sense and this interested me. I try not to go completely in the Western tradition because I feel that sometimes it’s out of context to what I do, so right now that is where it is. But yes, I see the difference and identify it. BC: Right. But apart from the differences, do you feel (as you already mentioned) there is a sense of meeting or intersection or confluence of the two different thought schools of sound practices and listening? IK: Are you asking about the similarity? BC: Similarity, the confluence or meeting of two different sonic worlds. Is there something like that? IK: Linearly we think that we are opening up to the world or the knowledge is opening up to understanding many things. So that’s

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the linear ideology. When I was studying in school as a child, musically I learned what we have traditionally—our dancers can’t count straight, for example. We learned this as children in the school. As a culture. Yes, as a culture because it took me so many years to understand that that is not their philosophy, they have a dialogue between dancer and the drummer, which is why they don’t count straight. It took me so many years to understand that. But unfortunately, I think still in the school, they teach like that. When we say that the world is developing and opening up to things, it is the West that is opening up things. But I realised later that what they were trying to achieve is what we were already doing in some way as a practice in a ritualistic way. We didn’t probably call it ‘Art’s Art’ and separate it. They did many things together—they had many ideas together. They were harvesting or nesting some problem and that’s why they did that. It has a ritualistic aspect; it has many aspects together, but as a practice of recognising some of the sound even in the day-to-­ day life, they learnt certain animal sounds and understood when certain animals make certain sounds. So I think in terms of what they tried to achieve or gather, there were certain similarities. At the same time, while there were certain similarities about the idea, there were things that were not meeting as well. This specific idea of not counting straight or counting in a quantifiable, measurable manner is embedded in many of the sonic cultures in the Global South. This non-quantifiable or temporally non-­linear manner of dealing with sound was invaded when recording technology was first introduced in these regions because in recording you count from a beginning to an end. Was it disruptive? For me as an artistic process? Yes. How do you personally deal with quantifiable strategies of sound production and listening? It’s quite interesting. I wasn’t a fan of metronome at all. Even in music production, I wasn’t so interested in metronome in my teenage days of producing music. But this agreement of commanding time from a device or somewhere else comes as a command from another pair of invisible hands. Machine; from a machine. Yes, from a machine that decides that this is the time. There were so many things I did to get away from that. I have realised that in

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some of the compositions I tried to do, I wanted to break exactly that even when I was seeing if a drummer could find something. I don’t want it to completely break, but to understand that somebody else is trying to give you this time, which is not measured. Yes, when it comes to recording, I try not to think of it as time, but think of it as space. Rather than counting periods of time, I think of it as space and working with certain empty space. I wonder how it actually changed the mindset of music, especially in drummers’ work you know, particularly in terms of how they treat their instrument because of the metronome. I think it’s quite a massive issue; it’s the same for the piano, like giving a certain pitch and saying ‘okay this is the standard’; that’s structured. It is also the same when it comes to computer music—that’s the most questionable thing. The pitch and the time, which are like the grid and the piano structure that you are depending on. Most of the software was like that, except some of the programming languages. But we are going through even that in the same way; still most of the software is like that. We still couldn’t break this pattern. BC: Recording itself is a linear representation of time and of sonic phenomena, which are emergent in nature and non-linear in movement. Was it problematic for you in the beginning as you worked with field recording? IK: Yeah, I would say in the later years I was more interested in listening. Then I realised this multiple narration of sound too. It is an immersive space and at the same time you are surrounded with the fluid of sound almost like you are inside a pool and you can’t get away from that. So when you come to compositions, even performing sounds, both of them have this linear aspect that has unfortunately become the format or the structure in itself. I think this was a problem for me especially at the time when I was more interested in installation also. I was thinking of why I couldn’t think of the composition as a space. It’s the same way in which I am living an everyday life; that’s how I experience life. This was a problem not in the beginning but at a later stage and sometimes I even stopped playing and performing. Presently I try not to perform so much because of some of these reasons. BC: Performance can be time bound, but it could be something emergent, something that goes by itself. For example, there are all day

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long performances—there are already cultures and traditions where you perform all day long. IK: Yes, true. Actually performance has more openness than composition. Just as I told you, in the Pirith, they chant throughout the night. They may be chanting for two days, which is right now in the sense we are creating that form. Right now we are taking it like a musical form that takes place throughout the day. So yes, performance has that quality. This is one of the reasons why I was more interested in setting up different, multiple speakers to perform— setting up different spaces, bringing in very southern side specific things, going to a specific space and doing it, etc. I am also thinking of time as an element to give more immersiveness. The composition is permanent; you can’t delete it; it’s recorded. It’s part of history, it’s memory—it’s exactly like a painting. We do not have that performance itself; in that moment, we deal with a memory of a performance. BC: Yeah, fixing the memory like a fixed media or a landscape painting that is frozen in time and space. IK: Exactly. Yes. I don’t think I have a complete answer. I still have more questions than I do answers. BC: This approach of freezing sound into a fixed media is deeply problematic when it comes to how we culturally grew with a particular sonic sensibility and listening culture in South Asia. Now, this approach of freezing is fundamentally a Western approach, making humans observe sound from an objective distance and objectify sound into a disc or cassette; it is like turning a landscape into a painting. How do you negotiate this approach in your own work, how do you resist it? You already said a bit, but I would like to hear more. IK: I think it’s a good question. I think most of our culture is based on this immediate performance of arts, dance or music, specifically body movement or music. These are always immediate things, so after that it is done; it’s for that moment and then it’s finished. That tradition is the same in the southern region that we are actually dealing with. But if you think about literature, we are dealing with a certain memory, certain points (to write books or print books, for example), but that also came from an oral tradition specially in our region. We came from learning poems and repeating poems to pass the knowledge, to pass certain things.

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BC: Orally. IK: Yes, orally, that’s what Pirith is also, it is about the chanting of the Buddhist script. So what I wanted to say was that it was more of an oral literature based society but we have more authors and writers focusing on written things. My main problem is to convince them to listen to sound rather than mixing it up with lyrics. This is the main problem I have been dealing with my entire life. In this sense, I don’t have a direct answer but I do have a question of what it is. When you record something, it also becomes a medium in itself, that’s why we are treating let’s say vinyl itself, as a medium right now. We are treating some of the tapes; that’s why we go back to some of the analogue things. This is a very sensitive practice. Let us say we do a performance and live with a resonance; I feel like we are forgetting about it as a culture and as a society even. Living with a resonance is quite an important point. BC: Is this writing driven society or writing driven approach to sound something that is colonially influenced? Do you think it’s colonial, in the way that there is a violence happening and this violence was invented or started through the colonial period? IK: Well I think partly yes. I mean there was a way in which historically people used to write on what you call the palmyra; we have these leaves, so they used to write on them. BC: Papyrus? IK: Yes, papyrus. BC: That’s in the West. IK: I can’t remember which paper but we had that sort of paper, which was made out of a similar kind of process. So that was there but later on I feel like the technology of printing also came about probably in the late eighteenth century I guess. Even in India, was it late eighteenth century? BC: If we think in terms of sound, writing sound came in 1902 for the first time. Before that music was never recorded. Music was performed and lived with resonance as you said. 1902 is the moment when recording of sound and music took place for the first time in the southern part of the globe. That’s recent—in 1902. IK: 1902. Was it in India? BC: It was in India, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, Latin America and all over the world through the colonial recording expeditions to build a sound industry using the colonial subjects as resources. It was

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imposed on the colonial subject to exploit, to objectify and keep a document—like a log of what is culturally under control, under rule. And printing came a little earlier, also through colonialism. IK: I think there was a rebellious phase to address colonisation, but I cannot say the exact details because I think it has multiple directions. As a country, we are still trying to understand what exactly was that colonial period and what the post-colonial period is. I think after the 1950s, the beginning of modernisation happened in India, Sri Lanka in a national sense. Certain things happened in India and Sri Lanka, especially the Radio Ceylon and how it worked together with India. This person used to come to Radio Ceylon to grade musicians here. He was grading musicians in Sri Lanka, like ‘these are class A musicians, these are class B singers’. This is also a period that came because of that colonisation phase just after the post-colonial era when we were heading into thinking as a continent or as a subcontinent. I think it happened in literature as well, so it was more dominating in that sense. I feel as an idea and as a culture somehow they were more connected with writing and printing. As a society I still don’t know if we are exactly ‘reading people’—whether we are reading that much. But it was quite prominent, books are quite prominent here, and we still believe in that. Later, from the 70s onwards when the recording on cassette tapes appeared, vinyl wasn’t that much popular because I don’t think people could normally afford vinyl at that time. The cassette tapes were popular. Because it could go to any social background and it doesn’t depend on the economy. I think it did certain things in the terms of acting as a reply to colonisation. I think here we still have that problem; I think we are still dealing with the problem. BC: Still under colonisation, extended colonialism. IK: Yes, exactly. BC: As an artist or as a musician, how do you like to address these questions and ideas in your work? Do you find the trajectory of your practice reflecting these ideas as a sort of rebellion or as a resistance? IK: I think in more recent years, I had this question more and more present in my life as an artist. Some of the things lead me to not compose, not to do things as well because I needed time to deal with other things. Especially other things that I haven’t said about the visual art practice in Sri Lanka. Some of the contemporary visual art practice is very present here compared to contemporary musical

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practice, but it also comes from a Western angle. If you think about what we were talking about, it’s the same thing in the manner that visual art practice is present in Sri Lanka. Right now, there are people who are working; there are discussions happening here. Maybe it’s not exactly like India, but it is present. At one point, I was working in Theertha. Do you know Theertha Collective? BC: Theertha Collective, no? IK: There is an artist collective called Theertha.5 They are involved with contemporary visual arts in Sri Lanka. There is a painter called Prof Jagath Weerasinghe who is the one who founded Theertha. At one point, I was more involved with them for performance art. There are a couple of festivals as well. They were the first to start discussing performance art here. I had a bit of a connection with that because we were newly thinking about music as a performance and we were creating things, creating objects as instruments. We were trying to understand how you perform it and so on, which was more aligned with performance art. At that time, I was thinking about it. I had this question, ‘What is it when I am doing things?’ Why are certain things like my language more in sound rather than in writing? I tried to but I couldn’t contextualise in words some of my practices. I don’t have a language to describe it other than some words, which come from the Western art tradition/Western sound art practice. BC: Yes, for example, the term ‘sound art’ is a Western construct. IK: Exactly. At some point, I used to call my work experimental music and I called myself an experimental musician. Then at certain phases, I had to call myself a sound artist. What do I call myself? How do I recognise myself and the position I am in? Sometimes I cannot say that, but I end up saying I am a musician. I can’t call it experimental music because I am not doing experimental music anymore. I have tools and things with which I work regularly, so it’s not experimental anymore. It might have experimental things such as dealing with certain qualities, but it’s not that what we know as experimental exactly. It’s the same thing in sound art also because one side of sound art comes from the visual art definition of sound as a symbolic way of creating sound while the musical side comes 5  Theertha International Artists’ Collective; more information on the collective is available on their website: http://theertha.org.

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from the qualities of sound and composition. This thinking is about where I am positioned and what are my actions—what I do as an artist. BC: Action. IK: Yes, so this is the same again. I have certain actions as answers. For example, you will see this in the way I named or titled some of the things. I try to think more openly now rather than trying to say that it’s a sound piece. I rather try to give it a form in which I try to keep it open. I know it has both sides, I know it has good and bad sides as well but I do try to take some forms that come from a traditional background of some of the rituals thus creating a ritualistic element. As a ritual when they also did something like that in their performances, what sort of format was that? How do I name it? How do I deal with the atmosphere? How do I deal with the performance space? The way I set up some of these things I am obviously concerned about. But, yes does it have acknowledgement of where I am and what I am doing? Where am I based? What’s my environment, what’s my dialogue with the environment? I don’t know whether this is an answer to you, but some of the things are questions as well. BC: Yes, I would like to take this statement forward—‘dialogue with the environment’. In the way Western modernity has perceived it, nature is seen as a resource for human consumption rather than a source for return and convergence. In this perspective, nature is a landscape painting that you observe from a distance. Many scholars and philosophers think, in the Western understanding of nature, that there is a divisive approach, an estrangement, in other words, a breaking down of humans and nature. Do you feel in your practice as an artist, this ‘dialogue with the environment’ means that you are considering a different approach in perceiving nature and environment? Why do you have a dialogic approach? IK: It is a good question. When you are living in a particular space, you have your own sonic identity. If you are living in the heart of Colombo, you have traffic all around you. I don’t know if you have been to Colombo. Have you been? BC: Not yet. IK: Okay, if you come, you will see that it has a completely different sonic identity. It could be similar to India, but it has its own sonic identity. That’s the differentiation of the environment—what’s

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happening around, the intensity, the language, sounds, soundscapes and things which are happening, the vehicles, type of vehicles, etc.. My approach and my dialogue come from the place I am based in. Long-time back one of my friends asked me (I was composing a music piece for his short film), ‘What inspired you at this moment to do that? What is your inspiration?’ Basically, the immediate thing I could say (I remember I was riding a bike with him in Colombo) was, ‘What you can hear from outside, right now. This traffic has its own identity, its own chaos, and all those things around. It has that identity.’ A couple of years back I had this residency here in Sigiriya. If you have heard of Sigiriya, there is a very famous rock; they have cave paintings in it, similar to Ajanta paintings. Around that area is a wild thick forest. We were in a residency with a couple of people. I remember we were in the middle of the forest, we were disconnected from the main road, we couldn’t hear anything other than that environment. This friend of mine wanted to play music over there and I asked him, ‘Why do you do that? You are not in Colombo any more, you are in a completely different sonic environment, now you don’t have this everyday life. For a certain period of time, you are having this residency here in this moment’. I felt that he was violating the environment by playing loud music. If I am not able to identify that, if I am not able to go with it or to find some tool with it to identify that, I can’t be in that position. It’s exactly why I understand why he played music in that form. When he played that music, he was changing and shifting that environment because he wanted to have whatever memory he had before—of everyday life in Colombo, whatever he does, playing the music. So he is actually building his sonic environment in that sense. My question is also that we are always thinking of changing the environment and also thinking of nature like the very self of nature as if the wild life is a threat to the human environment. We are afraid of that; so this fear driven idea as a society/fear driven idea as a listener I think is very much present for me and it brings questions. What’s my environment even if I am based somewhere else for a short period of time? What’s my dialogue with that environment? What’s my dialogue with that sonic identity? BC: It is a more intimate, more close-knitted relationship with nature; it’s like you take it as your own such that you have the right to even change it.

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Yeah it does in a way. I must say, right to change it or right to not change it? Sometimes you don’t want to do anything else other than listening. Sometimes you don’t need to constantly make an attempt to identify yourself. It’s also a part of listening and identifying yourself. BC: Yes, that is why your works are a bit noisy, I guess. For example, Butterfly in the Chest where you used field recordings of the city has considerable noise content.6 Do you consider noise as something inclusive in your work because of this dialogic relationship with nature and the environment? IK: In a certain way, yes. It depends on the terms of the composition or the open-ended compositional method. Because if you bring up something, I sometimes also go according to that. I was interested in that environment which also acts as an immersive place in that pool of sound in between scattered things. It actually defines the idea of you in that moment. Even in everyday life, this is the way we think about how we deal with things. That’s why sometimes we soundproof things. BC: Yes, we clean things; we clean natural sounds using software. IK: Exactly. BC: These software take out the natural elements for human consumption. IK: I think of how sonic environments create identity; it positions you in a certain place; I cannot get away from that certain place. For instance, at one point, we were living next to Music Matters actually; we were living in the heart of Colombo in a very busy junction. Every day after school, we used to go to a little teashop to have tea. Most of the days I would take my recorder and just have a walk with a couple of my other friends. When I used to walk around, there was a tunnel underground and a crossing as well that went through the tunnel. Sometimes vehicles would go inside it, buses and what not; I used to take the bus from my place to Music Matters. This was my everyday life at that moment; it defined me so much and noise was part of that process. Sometimes I do field recordings and manipulate them, trying to make them not sound like that. I like the qualities of different sounds for an object—how do you move the object to create sound patterns or create 6

 Listen: https://soundcloud.com/isuru-kumarasinghe/that-butterfly-in-the-chest.

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s­ omething, how do you play that object and bring out that texture. That’s what you call quality. BC: When you share your work in a performative context, how do you like to engage with the audience? Is it also a dialogic process? IK: Are you talking about the compositions? BC: Yes, the compositions or performance—performing a composition. You said you used to do live performances of sound works. Do you like entertaining your work to the audience or what is your approach to engaging with the audience? IK: There was a time when we worked as a collective, especially with one of my friends called Isaac Smith (he is from New Zealand, but he has stayed with us for a long time). We were talking about the realm of listening. We listen to each other as musicians, we listen to ourselves as musicians and if I have another person playing, I listen to that person. But then there is another element, which is the audience—the third element. How do I treat them? How do I involve the audience in this process without them knowing it completely? If you are playing a song, you are practising and performing in front of the audience. But when you are playing a sound piece, you are improvising something and then you have a direct dialogue with the audience. There was a time when I was actually thinking that I was part of the audience. I was trying by setting myself up close to the audience, to not to make a boundary of where the real stage is, where my things are—trying to set up in the middle of the audience. These are the kinds of things I do because I cannot exactly say, ‘Me and my audience’. I am a listener myself when I am playing, so I am the audience as well when the performance is happening. Sometimes I do think about how they feel, but I am not saying that I am entertaining them. But do I think about my engagement with the audience? Or am I completely disconnected? There are performances I do where I treat it as only just sound and I am not thinking about the audience. I did a performance with my friends and collaborators in which we installed different speakers throughout the space. We had a couple of channels; rather than going with two speakers in front of us, we went through different speakers throughout the space. Whoever came there could choose to sit down or lie down and they can be together in that form. What happens to a space when there is a person and there is something

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else happening—when there is a sound in that space. What kind of relationship is established? One more thing we did was a lecture performance. We had this trio that played with Sumudi the drummer, I told you: myself and another musician called Sarani. We did an open rehearsal. We played but at the same time we came up with an idea and explored it in the moment. We were engaging with the audience and asking whether there is anything they needed to know and also explaining what we were doing and what the idea we were working on was. BC: Right. IK: I did this in another form; it was a performance I did for a performance art festival, by Theertha—a gathering sound chant. We were spontaneously singing something one by one as the audience gathered and we were asking them to participate. We were inside a room with 50 or 60 people together inside, chanting together spontaneously. BC: It is like sharing the same sound together. IK: It is, yes. Thinking of the audience, what is an audience? What is a musician? When you are working with an object, when you are making a texture with an object or even with an instrument rather than melody, it’s a very personal experience. Sometimes I would like to work with the audience. I did a performance for which I invited someone from the audience to come and sit with me. I had some objects, wooden things, metals and other different materials to use as instruments. I explained the object to them and asked them ‘would you maybe…’ I showed them that each one had a different character of sound and you could make sound in different ways. They then explored the sound and asked whether you can change the sound, whether you can do different sounds. When they try to make a different sound, I’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll also do this’; they would think that they were having a dialogue or having a discussion that was not with words but with sounds. This also came with the audience and the musicians. What did I do as a sound maker? And how does it feel as an audience? Sometimes it’s hard when you don’t know how it comes, but I know the beauty of it as well—to not know where it came from and what sound it was. BC: Wonderful, I think that’s where we should stop. Or if you would like to add something about your thought process, something

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related to the questions we dealt with here, please do. Would you like to add something? IK: These questions you asked, sometimes it comes to me in different words as an artist. As a process, I think it’s a continuous change in things. Also, in order to develop, change is inevitable you know; like you are always going through that. Yes, what I could say is contingent, you know that’s there—of finding out, learning to understand and constructing again and deconstructing it to create something else at times. This process goes on, this process is contingent, that’s something I wanted to say. BC: Contingency, yes. Just one last question because you said contingent, I was wondering whether you place yourself in a Sri Lankan context or a universal context because often if you go to Europe to perform, they would term you as a ‘Sri Lankan sound artist’. Do you find it problematic? Or do you like to find a universal place for you where there is no limiting cultural identification as such? IK: Like we discussed, there are certain identities/sonic identities I am inspired by, and I also base my work on my environment. I can say I am from Sri Lanka, but it keeps the question within me as well. I identify myself with this environment. The things that came out also work as a reply to this environment. I cannot exactly say whether I am universal or not. BC: It is almost like you don’t want to erase your local identification but at the same time you would like to connect globally, or ‘universally’ with other sound practitioners and artists in solidarity. IK: In a way, yes. I cannot erase my localness, I cannot erase where I am coming from. As an example, I am having a real hard time playing instruments like the guitar right now. Even to make a texture I cannot take it because it has these questions to sound and sound identity also—where I am connected, why? BC: Good. It was a fascinating conversation and thank you so much for your time. IK: Yeah, thank you so much. My partner is a contemporary dancer. She is coming from the background of Bharatanatyam, so she is half Sri Lankan and half German. She grew up in Berlin, in the Sri Lankan diaspora. She is dealing with similar sorts of questions. For the past few years, we were talking about these things. She also does things from a listening angle, combining listening and dance. We

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were actually talking about this and when you sent the message, I told her—‘Look, he sent me a message saying I was actually l­ ooking forward to having this conversation’; this is what I waited for a long time. BC: It was such a pleasure. Such an insightful conversation we had. IK: I think we should keep in touch. I would really like to have more conversations later some other time. BC: Yes, absolutely.

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Index1

A Afro-futurism, 332 Alaap, 25, 25n8, 42, 42n4, 439, 442, 455 Ambedkar, B.R., 478 Anthropocene, 37 Anthropology, 248, 252, 255, 257, 259 Antiphonal, 65, 461 Anzaldua, Gloria, 317, 319n6, 320 Architecture, 63, 65, 167, 361, 370, 374, 382, 383, 386, 393, 419, 442, 476, 482 Attali, Jacques, 389 Auge, Marc, 386 Aural, 6, 65, 141, 286, 307, 339, 340, 342, 371, 374, 376, 379, 455 Avant-garde, 61–63, 287, 448, 449, 470, 471, 476, 479

B Bartok, Bela, 20 Beethoven, Ludwig Van, 20, 21, 26, 30, 87, 150, 159, 351 Blues, 125, 246, 482 Bollywood, 337 Buddhism, 350 C Cacophony, 266 Cage, John, 27–29, 47, 47n14, 62, 63, 66, 74, 78, 80, 102, 105, 191, 203, 222, 226, 230, 246, 258, 310, 350, 356, 369, 408, 429, 438, 446, 451, 453, 462, 489–492 Capitalism, 10, 299, 455 Carnatic music, 41n2, 41n3, 46, 46n10, 62 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 43–44

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8

511

512 

INDEX

Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya, 11, 139–156, 307–325, 365–380, 403–421 Colonial (-ism/-ist), 2, 3, 5–8, 10, 13, 42, 43, 53, 66, 73, 80, 115, 129, 134, 146, 149–152, 155, 156, 165, 167, 174, 175, 178, 180, 204, 207, 233, 235, 236, 248, 253, 255, 261, 263, 271, 273, 284, 287, 291, 295–297, 299, 300, 303, 305, 325, 332, 336, 342, 346, 354, 385, 392, 417, 436, 448, 473–475, 481, 496, 497 Colonisation, 2, 3, 33, 44, 64, 66, 77, 95, 130, 179, 181, 184, 204, 253, 271, 278, 284, 291, 294–297, 299–301, 303, 334, 342, 346, 354, 378, 379, 400, 430, 431, 435, 456, 463, 469, 473, 475, 497 See also Decolonisation Coltrane, John, 62, 63, 143 Cox, Christoph, 202, 247 Cunningham, Merce, 66 D Dabashi, Hamid, 111, 111n7 Can Non-Europeans Think, 111, 111n7 Dada (-ist), 466, 470 Debussy, Claude, 40, 221, 350 Decolonisation, 6, 178, 179, 236, 290, 303, 304, 312, 317, 320, 321, 389, 417, 463, 473, 478 Deleuze, Gilles, 54, 294, 304 Depth of field, 65, 108, 331, 340, 374, 392, 399, 455, 461 Deterritorialisation, 54, 427

Dhrupad, 25, 25n8, 42n4, 47, 77, 175, 439, 439n5, 442, 444, 445, 448, 470, 475, 480, 481 Duration (-ality), 64, 73, 144, 358 E Ecology, 89, 312 Einstürzende Neubauten, 190, 199, 203 Electro-acoustic music, 20, 126, 187–189, 213, 214, 221, 227, 345, 347, 357, 361, 364, 365, 487 Electronic music, 20, 112, 189, 195, 196, 205, 211, 215, 221, 223, 236, 291, 310, 328, 347–349, 352, 354, 359, 403–406, 410, 411, 420, 437, 438n3, 439, 441–444, 447, 454n4, 463 Eliot, T.S., 172 Eno, Brian, 220, 221, 454 Ethnography, 2, 12, 318, 346, 384, 475 Ethnomusicology, 141, 157, 163, 167, 168, 319 Eurocentric, 4, 9, 12, 15, 16, 39, 75, 108, 135, 202, 236, 237 F Feminism, 96, 314, 317, 320 Field recording, 13, 14, 27, 29, 54, 75, 117, 139, 188, 190, 191, 195, 199, 218, 241, 243, 244, 247, 248n5, 254, 309, 314n3, 332, 340, 367, 371, 372, 375, 459–461, 480, 487, 494, 501 Flusser, Vilem, 54, 55 Fluxus, 44, 46, 47, 126, 204, 408, 448

 INDEX 

Folk, folklore, 47n13, 81, 87, 100, 104, 108, 111, 163n5, 166, 169, 206, 226, 228–230, 238, 240, 288, 331, 332, 349n2, 367, 398, 400, 403, 404, 407–409, 414, 418, 419, 427, 431, 433, 439, 440, 448, 470 G Gago, Veronica, 321 Gamelan, 163, 193, 199, 200, 205n10, 214, 221, 350 Gandharva, Kumar, 43, 43n7 Glissant, Edouard, 336 Poetics of Relation, 336 Global South, 2–12, 14, 15, 33, 34, 69, 76, 92, 102, 126, 129, 135, 146, 151, 157, 162, 207, 215, 216, 218, 219, 266, 271, 278, 290, 310, 315, 317, 323, 325n7, 334, 336, 338, 341, 342, 346, 377, 400, 416, 423, 456, 463, 474, 481, 493 Globalization, 33 Gnawa music, 73, 73n4 Gregorian chant, 44, 46 Guattari, Felix, 54, 294, 304 H Halim, Abdel, 72, 203, 221–223, 221n17 Harmonics, 24, 41n2, 63, 145, 251, 299, 375, 445n6 Hindustani classical music, 25n9, 62, 338, 444, 445 Hollywood, 40, 41, 244 Hooks, Bell, 321

513

I Identity, 29, 34, 51–54, 56, 70, 71, 75, 97, 104, 112–114, 127, 133, 134, 149, 150, 182, 220, 235, 288, 289, 308, 312, 313, 319, 319n6, 320, 329, 330, 334, 342, 351, 354–357, 359, 377, 378, 419, 420, 424, 426–428, 432, 456, 473, 477, 499–501, 504 Immigrant, 2, 214, 255–257, 259, 308–312, 319, 324, 325n7, 478 Improvisation, 26, 65, 69, 71, 88n7, 90, 105, 111, 115, 161, 166, 273, 274, 276, 278, 287, 288, 290, 331, 340, 358, 364, 374, 395, 396, 399, 428, 442, 456, 461, 474, 475, 487 Indian classical music, 7, 22, 41n2, 45, 47, 57, 65, 128, 167, 220, 375, 428, 446, 455, 479, 481 Indigenous, 7, 36, 51, 53, 54, 87, 180, 245, 250–253, 259, 260, 297, 301, 302, 310, 316–320, 398, 400, 421 Industrial music, 125, 126, 188, 196, 197, 203, 204, 210 Instrumental, 20, 78, 108, 152, 352, 364, 423, 442 J Javanese music, 71, 74, 205n10, 350 Jazz, 46, 61–63, 69, 70, 72, 74, 140, 142, 143, 143n4, 163, 244, 246, 309, 366, 367, 369, 370, 396, 482, 483 K Khayal, 163n5, 342, 444, 475 Khorshid, Omar, 72, 72n3 Kittler, Friedrich, 162

514 

INDEX

Korsgaard, Christine, 10 Kritis, 41 L LaBelle, Brandon, 102, 247 Ligeti, Gyorgy, 62, 66, 480 Loops, 122, 285, 373, 441, 482 M Maqām, 42, 42n6, 70, 70n1, 72, 116, 117, 160–163, 160n4, 174, 204, 226, 226n2, 284, 291, 349, 354, 387, 475 Margolles, Teresa, 122, 122n2 Mbembe, Achille, 339, 340 Mbira, 139, 141, 146, 148, 155, 180 Memory, 14, 28, 84, 86, 88–90, 107, 116–118, 165, 188, 189, 228, 261, 295, 296, 300, 303, 304, 308, 309, 311, 322, 329, 330, 336, 397, 413, 414, 416, 430, 443, 451, 472, 474, 495, 500 Microtone (-al/-ality), 24, 62–65, 71, 73, 144, 157, 160, 179, 200, 226, 291, 299, 341, 353, 375, 376, 390, 444, 445, 457, 479–481, 491 Migration, 85, 90–94, 97, 184, 311, 318, 325n7, 346, 354 Minimalism, 193, 220, 226, 448, 479 Modernism (-ist), 7, 51, 129, 162, 170, 207, 226, 245, 270, 287, 423, 475 Monophonic, 24 Musique Concrete, 88, 191, 204, 221n17 N Nada Brahma, 14, 15

Nationalism, 29, 97, 342, 470, 474 Noise, 38, 62–65, 74, 100, 101, 129, 187, 188, 190, 191, 196–198, 203, 206, 207, 210, 213, 220, 226, 227, 233, 236, 238, 241, 247, 266, 267, 276, 299, 310, 328, 372, 376, 379, 382–384, 390, 392, 398n4, 467, 469–472, 479, 485, 501 O Object-oriented ontology, 360 Oliveros, Pauline, 88, 88n7, 89, 91–93, 98, 102, 191, 491, 492 Opera, 37, 51, 87, 89 Orientalism, 177, 334 Oud, 57, 157–159, 162–165, 176, 182, 292, 362 P Pandey, Gyanendra, 339 Partition, 335, 336, 338–342 Plato, 171, 172 Republic, 171 Plurilogue, 10, 11 Polyphonic, 24, 63 Psychoanalysis, 302–304 R Raag (raga), 22–26, 25n8, 25n9, 36, 42n4, 47, 48, 63, 166, 167, 169, 170, 375, 438, 444, 445 Racism, 66, 184, 211, 214, 296–298, 317, 324 Radio, 22, 26, 27, 29, 82, 91, 99–101, 107, 190, 213, 263, 264, 266, 268, 274, 275, 277, 278, 282, 307–311, 329, 333, 335, 336, 342, 348, 349, 366,

 INDEX 

368, 398n4, 410, 420, 472, 479, 481 Raqs Media Collective, 370 Rawls, John, 10 Reich, Steve, 62, 369, 437–438, 451 Reinhardt, Max, 60 Research Architecture, 385 Riley, Terry, 46, 46n11, 47, 62, 63, 66, 78, 442, 479 Russolo, Luigi, 191, 491 The Art of Noise, 491 S Said, Edward, 111, 334 Schaeffer, Pierre, 218, 221n17, 222, 236, 246, 258, 261, 448 Shankar, Ravi, 22, 52, 62 Shohat, Ella, 10 Shruti, 24, 65, 375, 444, 455, 475, 480, 481 Silence, 38, 39, 94, 164, 193, 199, 217, 227, 229, 238, 247, 248, 257, 299, 341, 378, 397, 398, 468, 490, 491 Sitar, 22, 54, 443, 455, 469 Slavery, 66, 297, 298, 301 Smriti, 413 Sound art, 6, 12–14, 41, 42, 49, 61, 65, 66, 69, 75, 76, 78, 80, 83–85, 88–90, 102, 107, 113, 115, 116, 134, 135, 138, 187–191, 193–199, 201–204, 206, 211, 213, 215, 217, 219–221, 228–234, 236, 237, 246, 266–268, 276, 282, 325n7, 327, 331–333, 335–337, 341, 360, 365–368, 373, 375, 376, 378–380, 387, 396, 400, 405, 408–410, 416, 420, 424, 438, 440, 441, 448–455, 457, 459,

515

462, 463, 468–471, 479, 488, 489, 491, 498 Soundscape, 47, 48, 83, 85, 89, 227, 228, 241, 309–312, 315, 316, 318, 320, 328, 367, 378, 379, 441, 447, 459, 500 Spatialisation, 345, 405, 406, 409, 411–413 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 20, 66, 102, 191, 213, 218, 223, 471, 480, 489 Storytelling, 240, 305, 308, 309, 318, 331, 337, 369, 374, 376, 439 Subaltern, 96n9, 146 Subjectivity, 4, 128, 206, 274, 290, 295, 296, 298, 342, 358, 390, 391, 398n4, 428, 474, 478 Sufism, 228, 231, 232 Sun Ra, 410 Surveillance, 171, 271, 306, 313, 324, 325 Synthesizer, 190, 204 T Tabla, 22, 163, 163n5, 164, 166, 168, 443, 455 Takemitsu, Toru, 438 Tanpura, 23, 38, 177, 362, 445, 445n6 Tapes, 27, 27n11, 48, 76, 82, 84, 121, 122, 128, 129, 133, 188, 190, 196, 197, 210, 249, 268, 366, 367, 438, 450, 465, 481, 483, 489, 496, 497 Tarab, 42, 42n5, 57, 71, 72, 77, 77n8, 229, 229n4, 286, 391, 475, 482 Temple, 62, 64, 448, 472, 482 Temporality, 4, 25, 36, 64, 76, 87, 108, 109, 114, 128, 168, 169, 206, 274, 285, 291, 338, 339,

516 

INDEX

349, 358, 373, 390, 391, 399, 415, 416, 421, 428, 431, 445, 455, 461, 474 Thompson, Emily, 94, 386, 393 The Soundscape of Modernity, 94, 386 Thumri, 25, 25n9

281, 282n1, 283, 285, 288, 292, 293, 295, 296, 298–301, 303–305, 315, 320, 328, 333, 336, 337, 340, 342, 345, 351, 357, 368, 369, 387, 396, 420, 431, 435, 440, 444, 445, 448, 451, 454, 454n4, 476, 480, 487

U Urban, 126, 207, 209, 324, 367, 370, 371, 378, 379, 383, 384, 388, 490

W Wagner, Richard, 54, 447 Wahab, Abdel, 72, 72n2, 163 Weizman, Eyal, 387

V Vedic Philosophy, 169, 172, 173, 413 Voegelin, Salome, 102, 240, 250, 337, 339 Voice, 6, 9–12, 14, 15, 23, 28, 42, 46, 63, 66, 84, 87–89, 100, 101, 103, 104, 117, 118, 144, 147, 151, 160, 184, 202, 260, 273,

X Xenakis, Iannis, 62, 102, 453 Y Yoko Ono, 47 Young, La Monte, 46, 46n11, 47, 66, 78, 220, 408, 443, 479